“Les Branches”

A tree at close range — trunk, branches, the landscape beyond broken into interlocking planes of colour. By 1958 André Lhote (1885–1962) had been painting in his mature Cubist manner for over four decades, and Les Branches shows what that four decades of commitment produces: a painting of complete assurance, made quickly and with total conviction, in which the structural intelligence and the chromatic joy are inseparable. The colour here is more varied and more openly Fauvist than in his landscape panoramas — the orange of the trunk and branches set against the flat blue of the sky, the greens of the foliage ranging from acid yellow-green to deep teal, the ground broken into patches of mauve, ochre, rose and cream. The blue outlines that define each plane are characteristic of his late practice — a device that simultaneously flattens and structures, borrowed originally from Cézanne and the Cubists and made entirely his own. The marks are direct and confident, each one placed without revision, the whole canvas resolved in a way that only comes from a painter who has completely internalised his system and no longer needs to think about it. The tree subject gave him exactly what he looked for: a natural form that demands structural thinking, a vertical axis around which the surrounding landscape can be organised into its component planes. In this he follows a tradition that runs from Cézanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings through the Cubist reorganisation of landscape and into his own particular reconciliation of the two. Born in Bordeaux in 1885, Lhote founded the Académie Montparnasse in 1922, where his students included Tamara de Lempicka, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Diego Rivera. He represented France at the Venice Biennale in 1954 and received the Grand Prix National des Arts in 1956. A major retrospective of his work was held at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris in 1958 — the same year this canvas was painted. His work is held in the Centre Pompidou, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Tate in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.