After attending the course in decorative sculpture in Bordeaux, Lhote dedicated himself to painting and moved to Paris. He participated in the 1906 Salon des Indépendants and in the 1907 Salon d’Automne, approximating the poetics of Cézanne (1839-1906). In 1912, he participated in the group La Section d’Or [The Golden Section], assimilating, above all, the constructive and geometric rigor of cubism. He published numerous historic and theoretic writings: Treatise on Landscape Painting (1938), Peinture d’abord (1942), Treatise on Figure Painting (1950). He gathered writings by artists in From the Palette to the Writing Desk (1946). He opened his own school, on Rue d’Odessa, in Paris, attended by the Brazilian painters Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973), Francisco Brennand and Antonio Gomide (1895-1967). His influence in Brazil is also perceptible in the public artworks by Di Cavalcanti (1897-1976) and Candido Portinari (1903-1962). Composition — Interior with Female Figures (1936) evokes the theme of interior harem scenes dealt with by 19th-century orientalism, namely by Delacroix (1798-1863) in Women of Algiers (1834), in light of Cézanne’s bathers and the cubist experiments.
— MASP Curatorial Team, 2017
By Luciano Migliaccio
Possibly the inscription on the back refers to Beatrix Reynald, who moved to Rio de Janeiro during World War II and sold her collection to help the French Resistance. This composition is a somewhat academic exercise inspired in 19th-century Orientalist painting, both in the manner in which figures are presented and the decoration of the boudoir. The model for the figure on the right was taken from Delacroix’s Women from Algiers. The canvas features simplified forms typical of monumental painting. While resembling advertisement designs of the 1930s, Lhote’s work also influenced the decorative and mural painting that became a cultural program in numerous countries in the postwar period, including Di Cavalcanti and Portinari in Brazil.
— Luciano Migliaccio, 1998
