Charlotte Henschel (1892-1985), Undergrowth, 1955, Oil On Canvas

Charlotte HENSCHEL
1892, Wroclaw (Poland) – 1985, Paris
Undergrowth, 1955
oil on canvas
46 x 55 cm
signed lower left
titled and dated on the reverse
frame : 48 x 57 cm
craquelure and minor losses

Charlotte Henschel was born in 1892 in Breslau (now Wrocław) into an enlightened, bourgeois Jewish family rooted in the Haskalah movement. Trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Breslau and later in Berlin in the studio of Karl Hofer, she was early on exposed to the European avant-gardes. In 1926, she settled in Paris, joined the Académie Ranson, and found among Roger Bissière and his circle—Alfred Manessier, Jean Le Moal, Nicolas Wacker—a community of friendship and aesthetic inquiry that would durably shape her work. Her style, poised between figuration and abstraction, blends Cubism, spirituality, and symbolism. During the war, having taken refuge in the Lot region, Henschel endured poverty and fear; she was interned and later forced into hiding with the help of artist friends and local farmers. Despite anxiety and hunger, she continued to paint, often using makeshift materials. After the Liberation, she attempted to reestablish herself within the Parisian art scene, exhibiting in 1947 at the Galerie de Berri.

In the early 1950s, Charlotte Henschel was still living in the Lot. Her living conditions there remained modest: she occupied a small house adjoining a rudimentary studio and divided her time between daily chores and painting. Letters from this period reveal a life governed by the seasons, solitude, and material hardship, yet sustained by a constant working discipline. Her art remained deeply marked by the experiences of the previous decade. Henschel painted on reduced formats, often on salvaged panels, cardboard, or scraps of canvas she stretched herself, using paints and brushes sent by her artist friends who had remained in Paris. Her work increasingly focused on light, natural rhythms, symbolic forms, and materiality. The paintings from these years display a more restrained palette, dominated by ochres, muted reds, and luminous grays. In this chosen silence, Henschel pursued a discreet yet essential body of work, faithful to the spirit of rigor and freedom that defined the Académie Ranson.

Public collections
Centre national des arts plastiques, Paris
Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme, Paris
La Piscine – Musée d'art et d'industrie André Diligent, Roubaix
Musée Henri-Martin, Cahors
MUDO – Musée de l'Oise, Beauvais