Henriette Fauteux-Massé was known for her textured, geometric abstract paintings, which were particularly influential in the 1950s and 1960s.

Fauteux-Massé was born in Coaticook, Quebec in 1924. As a teenager she was interested in dance and performance, but shifted her attention to painting in 1941, after a friend gave her an easel, stool and cast models. Fauteux-Massé was not formally trained in art, but she took many self-directed research trips, and had mentors. From 1946 to 1948 she traveled to New York three times, where she met with contemporary abstract artists and visited museums. She was also influenced by European art history and was especially interested in French painters such as Nicolas Poussin. In 1951, after receiving a scholarship from the Quebec government, she traveled to Paris, in part to study with the Cubist painter André Lhote.

After returning to Montreal, she devoted the next five years to developing her own artistic style. By the late 1950s she had developed an engaging visual language, consisting primarily of colourful, thickly painted rectangular shapes. Most of her work uses a rigid board for support, enabling a confident and strong application of paint. The centrally grouped forms are sculptural and tactile, leaving open space around the edges. Fauteux-Massé made collages as preparatory studies, where she intuitively and playfully arranged and overlapped shapes. Her studio procedures and practices yielded work that looked carefully arranged and structured, contrary to the spontaneous, lyrical approach of the earlier generation of artists associated with the Automatist movement in Quebec. Fauteux-Massé’s work is compelling, balanced between a genuine interest in free experimentation with paint and composition, and an equal demand for structure and cohesion.

Fauteux-Massé was active throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In 1957 she joined and exhibited with the Non-Figurative Artists' Association of Montreal, and in 1959 she exhibited her work at Canada House in New York. In 1966 she became one of the founding members of the Conseil de la peinture, and in 1968 she joined the Société des artistes professionels du Québec. After 1970 she turned to landscape and figurative painting, which did not garner the same attention and recognition as her earlier abstract work. Her work has been exhibited in Canada and abroad, including at the International Painting Competition in Granby, Quebec (where she won first prize), at the Musée d'art moderne in Paris and the Salon des femmes peintres in Paris. Her work is included in the art collections of the National Gallery of Canada and the Musée du Québec.