André Lhote

ANDRÈ LHOTE, (Bordeaux, 1885 - Paris, 1962).
"Mirmando. La côte de Chateau", 1955.
Oil on canvas.
Signed in the lower left corner.
Attached photocopy of a handwritten letter from the artist to the first buyers of the painting in which he speaks exclusively about the work.
Measurements: 38 x 46 cm, 47 x 55 cm (frame).

In this piece you can appreciate the tonality of colors typical of Lhote, evoking on numerous occasions green, red and orange colors. In this landscape we can appreciate his passion for cubism and how he captures it in the composition, drawing with the brushstroke. The Picassian style, contemporary in time and place, is present in all his work.

The theoretical work of this creator has been fundamental for the understanding of 20th century art. His plastic work goes through several stages, venturing into themes such as landscape, the nude, prostitution, life in the port, the bourgeois woman, among others. In many of these themes, we can appreciate his proximity to Fauvism, his distancing from the nineteenth-century sense of painting, his special imprint in the Spanish art of the twenties and a personal configuration of spaces, which makes geometries a malleable element for his narratives, which make everyday life and the popular world his main interests.

After attending the sculpture course at the École des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux, he entered the world of professional painters. He exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Indépendants in 1906 and at the Salon d'Automne the following year. He was attracted by Cubism, integrating the Section d'Or.
He tried to adapt Cubism to classicism and therefore obtained the adhesion of a large number of amateurs who were frightened by the excessively radical changes, but in his works he denotes the purest academicism. In 1922 he opened an academy to spread his aesthetic thought, acting as an influential pedagogue. His theoretical work had great weight in the central decades of the twentieth century. Among his students were William Klein, Tamara de Lempicka, Lino Spilimbergo, Bertrand Dorny, Marcelle Rivier, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Héctor Sgarbi, Greta Knutson and Robert Wehrlin.