October

Cubism introduced a cerebral charge to Louise Henderson’s painting in the late 1940s, encouraging her to challenge traditional representations of optical experience in favour of a more independent and exploratory vision in which form was untethered from nature. The period from the late 1940s to the end of the 1950s was, arguably, Henderson’s most productive phase as she explored a range of cubist techniques, penetrating beneath the surface of the appearance of form to cast underlying geometric shapes and structure as the subject of her art. In 1987, aged 85, she created a large and dynamic series known as The Months, a powerful footnote to a career built on cubist-inspired experimentation and discoveries. Each month correlates to a season or event in the artist’s life. October was the month Henderson associated with the birth of her only child, Diane, and the central shape is a sharply cropped view of a pregnant woman, whose head and limbs continue beyond the edges of the picture plane.

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