Bibliography & Press

Large Cityscape (1992, acrylic on canvas) is held in the permanent collection of the Crocker Art Museum (accession no. 2007.40). The museum's interpretive text for the painting situates Henry within the broader Bay Area Figurative lineage, noting that although he was still an emerging artist in 1957, he was included in the landmark Bay Area Figurative Painting exhibition alongside his teacher, Richard Diebenkorn, and describing his tendency to build compositions from blocks of color that simultaneously flatten and deepen the scene, crediting renewed scholarship on Bay Area figuration in the 1990s with the re-appreciation of his work.

In the late 1950s, Henry looked like the Bay Area Figurative Movement's next rising name, winning first place at a 1957 Richmond exhibition the same year future icons Richard Diebenkorn, Nathan Oliveira, and David Park received only honorable mentions. Rather than chase wider fame, he moved south to be near his wife's family, raising four children while working outside the art world entirely, though, as he put it, "I never really left painting." With encouragement from Barbara and his family, his work returned to public view, beginning with a 1995 show at Harcourts Gallery in San Francisco, and collectors have watched the value of his paintings climb.

A profile on Henry's rediscovery by a Northern California gallery in the late 1990s, some forty years after he first stepped away from the Bay Area art world to support his young family in Southern California. The piece traces his early recognition alongside Richard Diebenkorn, Nathan Oliveira, and David Park; the decades he spent working outside the art world, including years working at Thacher School, all while continuing to create sculptures and paint privately; and his eventual return to full-time painting in Ojai, California. Henry describes the clarity that distance gave him: "I think there's a crystal in me that stayed clearer."

This article notes that while Bischoff and Park are usually credited with launching the Bay Area Figurative Movement in 1957, Henry, after decades out of the public eye spent working to support his family in Southern California, had resurfaced with his own vibrant, stylized take on abstract realism, his comeback work carrying, as the piece puts it, "a unique contentment and staying power."

Visitors to Henry's show at Carlton Gallery might feel an immediate spark of recognition: his compact, vividly colored views of land and townscape recall Richard Diebenkorn's earlier figurative period. But the review argues there's something more personal at work than homage: Henry had, in fact, studied directly under Diebenkorn and taken part in the Bay Area Figurative Movement decades earlier, before stepping away from the public art world for years. By the time of this show he was living in Ojai and working at The Thacher School, and his paintings, structured, the reviewer notes, as arrangements of geometric form rather than straightforward depictions of space, read as a genuine rediscovery.

Henry now resides in the Santa Barbara area and continues to paint both landscape and figurative images. His works are represented in numerous private and corporate collections. Villierme is an extremely sensitive, passionate man. He is a true purist and has limited outside influence, if any. He states, "I am not a recluse. I love people and I love the landscapes. That's why I paint them. I am still trying to improve on the landscapes, figures, and the cityscapes I was doing 40 years ago. I love the true way I can express the environment, and not be tainted by other art or artists. I find it exciting that most of my paintings are seemingly close to the older styles of paintings, yet I feel they've managed to be completely new."

Cross's survey covers the Richmond Art Center's 7th Annual, which she credits with establishing the new figurative painting introduced the year before as a genuine Bay Area movement. Henry, misprinted in the original as "Henry Villierne," is singled out among the prizewinners: then a CCAC candidate for his M.A., he received the $200 first award in oil for "Lake View," which Cross describes as "a very personal example of the new figurative painting suggesting vast space with large areas drenched with color," noting he'd also taken first prize that year at the Jack London Square Art Festival.

Arthur Millier's review covers the Los Angeles County Museum's presentation of the same twelve-artist Bay Area figurative painting exhibition Paul Mills had organized in Oakland that September, running through December 22. The piece is illustrated with Richard Diebenkorn's "July, 1957" and names Henry among the exhibiting painters, alongside Elmer Bischoff, David Park, Bruce McGaw, Robert Downs, Robert Qualters, Walter Snelgrove, and Paul Wonner, a rare piece of contemporary press placing his name in print during the movement's founding year.

The painting reproduced alongside the article is Richard Diebenkorn's "July" (oil on canvas, 58½ × 53¼ in, 1957).
Source: Richard Diebenkorn Catalogue Raisonné, RD Number 1211

Alfred Frankenstein, the San Francisco Chronicle's art critic from 1934 to 1965, reviewed the Oakland Art Museum's debut showing of the new Bay Area figurative painting, the exhibition Paul Mills had organized that fall. Singling out several of the dozen artists on view, Frankenstein praised "the grand scale and speed of Henry Villierme's 'Highway Study'" in the same breath as Elmer Bischoff's impressionistic richness, David Park's spacious "Interior," and Richard Diebenkorn's "Table," a rare instance of Henry's work drawing individual notice from one of the Bay Area's most influential critics.

Frankenstein found the show's historical section unremarkable ("the early pictures...emphasize quietude, somnolence, sleep"), but singled out Henry among several newer names "attached to paintings" that were new to him and that he wanted to see again, misprinting his name as "Henry Villeneuve," alongside Nancy Stromberg, Robert Strohmeier, Sam Richardson, Marilyn Orlob, and David Isenhart. View the exhibition's full artist roster →

In the catalog for the landmark exhibition, curator Paul Mills wrote of Henry, then still a young painter at CCAC: "He is drawn on the one hand to painters like Bonnard yet has a great deal of enthusiasm for German Expressionist painting and for the work of such artists as Munch. He has not been painting long enough to say of him that he has completely freed himself from the example of his teachers, yet he is a vigorous artist of obvious talent who I can advance rapidly. In my discussions with him, I found he sensed as I did that one of the sources of excitement in figurative painting today was in creating paintings which came perilously close to seeming like older styles of figurative painting and yet managed to be completely different and new."

The newspaper and author are unknown. The content closely matches the catalog for the Seventy-Sixth Annual Painting and Sculpture Exhibition of the San Francisco Art Association, held at the San Francisco Museum of Art from February 28 to March 31, 1957. Nearly every artist and title named in the review, including Henry Pierre Villierme's "Landscape," Elmer Bischoff's "Figures in Room," Joseph Brooks' "Sofa," and Henri Marie-Rose's "Daphnis et Chloé," matches the official exhibition list. At this time, this is the earliest dated piece of contemporary press in our archives that mentions Henry's work by name.