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Henrietta Shore (1880 - 1963)
Born in Toronto in 1880, Henrietta Shore spent thirteen years studying art in her native city, in New York (under William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri), and in Europe before settling in Los Angeles in 1913, where she began to exhibit and attract attention. Shore won an award at the Panama-California Exposition, San Diego, 1915 and in 1916 helped found the Los Angeles Modern Art Society. In 1920 she moved to New York, where her interest in abstraction and simplification began to surface and where she remained and continued to exhibit until 1923. She also was a founding member of the New York Society of Women Artists.

Shore's career was at its peak in the 1920s and 1930s, when between 1927 and 1930, she had seven one-person exhibitions and in 1936 and 1937, she completed six murals for the Treasury Relief Art Project. After moving to Carmel-by-the-Sea in 1930, Shore created some of her most memorable works, yet she would have only one more solo exhibition outside of the Carmel-Monterey area. That exhibition, in 1939 at the Georgette Passedoit Gallery in New York, contained many of Shore's most compelling works including some of her recently created Carmel works. Thereafter, Shore slowed down considerably, receiving only two more exhibitions during her lifetime, both retrospectives in the Monterey Bay area. In 1963 a small memorial retrospective was held at the Carmel Art Association, and not until twenty-three years later, in 1986, was a full retrospective mounted and a catalogue published.

Shore's relationship with Edward Weston has been the object of renewed interest in recent years. Weston wrote about Shore in his day books; Shore encouraged Weston to photograph shells; and it was Weston who urged Shore to visit Mexico in 1927. Weston described his first meeting with Shore in Los Angeles and the impact her paintings had on him.

Returning from Mexico in 1926, after three years of intense life, in which pre-hispanic monuments, the contemporary crafts, the bull-fight and the renaissance of fresco painting had given me fresh stimulus, I found art in California--with few exceptions--uninspired, lacking vitality. Then came a day when a friend took me to the home of Henrietta Shore... Ushered directly into a room hung with Shore's canvases I stopped short in my tracks silently amazed; here was something outstanding, a notable achievement...Approaching nature with reverence, using her tools with knowledge and command, her work compels attention.

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