André Lhote (1885-1962): Les langages de la modernité
until 3 September 2007
Galerie des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux
Jean-Pierre Moueix, the grand old godfather of wine merchants, who died three years ago at the age of 90, would have liked nothing better than to attend this exhibition of nearly 80 works by André Lhote, like him, a giant of Bordeaux art and patronage. Now in the seventieth year since their little enterprise was founded on the banks of the Dordogne, the Moueix family, which owns and manages some of the finest wine estates in the world, has helped to fund the purchase of some of Lhote’s most prestigious works.
These include A view of the port of Bordeaux, painted by Lhote in 1914, and Seaman playing an accordian (1920-6), when he was already near the pinnacle of his art. His works show cubism at its most colourful, with startling lines, prodigious perspectives and powerful images. Cubism involved rejecting the traditional two-dimensional presentation of objects in favour of displaying them simultaneously from different angles. The subject matter often looked ‘cube-shaped’, hence its name. Lhote lived and breathed cubism, and knew more than almost anyone about its history and philosophy.
At first Lhote specialised as a sculptor in wood and it was not until 1905 that he concentrated fully on cubism, and sponsored by a rich Bordelais collector, exhibited in Paris in 1907. Lhote was a fast and indefatigable worker, if a little unworldly, attracting some post-war criticism for collaborating with an exhibition of his work in the city of his birth in 1943.
But Bordeaux never forgot Lhote and he never forgot his roots. Many of his paintings featured and were painted on the banks of the nearby Bassin d'Arcachon, where, in an Indian summer of 1962, he spent several idyllic months with his fellow artist and friend Edmond Boissonnet before passing away in Paris.
