Oil / Panel: 44 x 57 cm
Born in 1885 in Bordeaux in France, André Lhote learned woodcarving from the age of 12 and trained to become a sculptor, before he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux. He painted on his spare time, influenced by Paul Gauguin and Cézanne, and eventually moved to Paris. At the beginning of the 20th century, Paris was flourishing with life and attracted artists from all over the world who wanted to educate themselves and seek inspiration from the many prominent galleries and museums. André Lhote fell into the influential artist group Section d’Or, which included artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Jean Metzinger and the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. In 1910 after four years in Paris, he held his first one-man exhibition at the Galerie Druet and a few years later he presented ten works at Section d’Or’s 1912 Salon. In contrast to contemporary operating artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, who were fully committed to the broken up forms of Cubism, Lhote retained elements of representation and classicism in his paintings and continued to do so even in his later works.