André LHOTE

Biography

André Lhote was born in Bordeaux on 5 July 1885 and died in Paris on 24 January 1962.

He was one of the representatives of the Cubist movement.

In Bordeaux, he spent ten years as an apprentice to a decorative sculptor and attended the decorative sculpture course at the Bordeaux School of Fine Arts until 1904.

It was while reading Diderot's Salons, Delacroix's Journal and Baudelaire's Curiosités esthétiques that he became interested in painting. He moved to Paris in 1907. The Eugène Druet gallery organised his first exhibition in 1910.

He joined the cubist movement in 1912 with his painting French Landscape, but he rejected what was too abstract in this form of painting and always sought to maintain a link with classical painting, whether through his subjects or the rigour of his compositions. He wanted to inscribe modernity, not in a rupture, but in the continuity of tradition.

Three of his works were exhibited at the Salon des indépendants in 1913.

He was discharged due to a retinal disease and therefore did not participate in the First World War. Assigned to the prefecture of the Gironde, he shared the office of Georges de Sonneville with whom he collaborated.

In 1919, thanks to Jacques Rivière, whom he knew, he wrote an art criticism column in La Nouvelle Revue française.

From 1918 onwards, he taught in various academies until he founded his own academy at 18, rue d'Odessa, in the Montparnasse district in 1922. He taught there until the end of his life. He collected texts by great masters, including Leonardo da Vinci, under the title De la palette à l'écritoire. The essence of his teaching lies in his two treatises: Traité du paysage and Traité de la figure.

Lhote also organised summer courses for his students in the house he had bought in 1926 in Mirmande in the Drôme. From 1940 onwards and throughout the Occupation, a number of artists found refuge there, such as Alexandre Garbell, Pierre Palué, Marcelle Rivier and Guy Marandet, who lived there.

In 1936, he was a member of the editorial staff of the communist newspaper Ce soir, for which he was in charge of the art section.

In 1938, he discovered Gordes where he bought a Louis XIII style house which he renovated. He lived there, alternating with Mirmande, from 1939 to 1942. He made his friends aware of the appeal of the village. Marc Chagall, Jean Grenier, Willy Ronis and others became his neighbours.

From the beginning, Lhote felt very much in tune with the "all-decorative" slogan of Art Deco. He kept this taste for decoration until the end. This is how he executed the murals of the Faculty of Medicine in Bordeaux in 1957.