The teachings of André Lhote

In 1922, André Lhote founded his own academy on Rue d’Odessa in Paris. He was an outstanding educator who taught his students to master the art of drawing and create meticulously designed compositions. Despite being influenced by cubism from 1912, he nevertheless remained faithful to a form of the representation of reality. Having rejected the complete break brought about by the abstract movement, his position represented the continuation of a pictorial tradition offering ample scope for geometric structures, in the style of Paul Cézanne. The various landscapes currently being conserved by the Bordeaux Museum of Fine Arts reveal the key role given to drawing and the desire to achieve a rhythm by playing with the contrasts between colours and values. This rhythmic organisation is reflected in the approach adopted by Denise Ferrier, for whom the relationship between lines and colour formed the subject of an in-depth study.