André Lhote’s Impact on Swedish Cubism and Modernism: An Important Teacher-student Relationship Lasting Five Decades Karin Sidén, Anna Meister ABSTRACT In 2017, the Swedish art museum Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde arranged an extensive exhibition based on new research dedicated to André Lhote and his great influence on Swedish Modernist artists and on Swedish Cubism and Modernism, in the period c. 1910–1960. The exhibition entitled Form and Co- lour. André Lhote and Swedish Cubism was the first of its kind and featured 52 out of the c. 200 identified Swedish students of Lhote. This article is based on the results from the research made in connection with the exhibition, with a special focus on the early Lhote students Georg Pauli and Prince Eugen as well as on the reception of André Lhote, as a teacher and art essayist, among artists and in Swedish art history. The essay also lists a number of interviews with Swedish artists and provides some insight into Lhote’s teaching method and its reception by Swedish artists. In recent years, the art museum Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde in Stockholm has featured many oeuvres and art movements of Swedish late 19th and 20th century art that are today more or less forgotten. The museum has also spotlighted the influence of artist colonies and the so-called académies libres on Swedish artists during this period. In 2014, Waldemarsudde organized a major exhibition, Inspi- ration Matisse! highlighting the influence of Académie Matisse and the teaching of Henri Matisse on Swedish early Modernists. The exhibition Form and Co- lour. André Lhote and Swedish Cubism (Fig. 1), arranged in the autumn of 2017, can be seen as a sequel to Inspiration Matisse!, which similarly focused on the importance of a teacher-student relationship. Our exhibition of 2017, featuring Lhote and his influence on Swedish Modernism and Cubism during the period c. 103 Karin Sidén, Anna Meister Fig. 1: Main Gallery Hall, Waldemarsudde from the Form and Colour. André Lhote and Swedish Cubism, 2017–2018 exhibition. Centred on back wall: Pauli, Georg, Bathing Youths, 1914, oil on canvas, 175 x 132 cm, Nationalmuseum. Left: Lhote, André, Port of Bordeaux, 1912, oil on canvas, 106 x 131 cm, Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde. © Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde / photo by Lars Engelhardt © ADAGP. 1910–1960, was the first of its kind and as such it required a vast amount of basic research, reflections and analysis (Meister / Sidén 2017). From an international point of view, too, our exhibition was the first ever to have focused on the impact of the teachings of André Lhote on a number of Modernist artists from a specific country and, indeed on the country’s Modernist and Cubist movements. In the course of his career, Lhote had an impressive number of students, num- bering some 2 000 from Europe, Asia, North and South America, Australia, India and Egypt. Some 200 of Lhote´s students, covering a period of over five whole decades, came from Sweden, starting in the early 1910s with Georg Pauli (1855– 1935) and a bit later, in 1913, Prince Eugen of Sweden (1865–1947). Eugen was not only an important landscape painter and cultural personality on the Swedish 104 André Lhote’s Impact on Swedish Cubism and Modernism art scene at the time, he was also one of the country’s most important art collec- tors and later became the founder of the Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde museum. Since the days of Prince Eugen, Waldemarsudde owns and maintains the larg- est collection of works in Sweden by the French painter, teacher and art essayist André Lhote. Upon the advice of his close friend, the artist and Lhote student Georg Pauli, Prince Eugen studied under the young Lhote in Paris in 1913, and also started to collect works by the French painter. His first acquisitions were made as early as 1912, including a version of Lhote´s famous composition Port of Bordeaux and also the painting Reclining Nude. Two of his last purchases were the paintings Recumbent Nude and In Praise of Geometry, bought in 1938 and 1941 respectively. In all, Eugen bought 17 works, of which 14 are oils or water colours and three are pencil drawings (Wistman 2008).1 In the Waldemarsudde archives there is a correspondence between Prince Eugen and André Lhote, which gives interesting insights into these acquisitions and also into the Prince´s fascination for Lhote´s views on art. Their contacts continued well into the 1930s. Prince Eu- gen met Lhote in Paris on several occasions; in September 1922, the French artist and his first wife Marguerite were Prince Eugen´s guests at his summer house Örgården, in the province of Östergötland, and a little later they stayed with Eugen at Waldemarsudde. At a dinner-party during their stay with the Prince, Georg Pau- li, the art critic Tor Hedberg with wife, and the German art historian Gustav Pauli, were also invited. Lhote´s first solo show outside France was financed by Prince Eugen and took place in 1913 at the SAK (Swedish Association of Art) venue in Stockholm. This was followed by three more solo exhibitions of Lhote´s work in Sweden, in 1916, 1923 and 1938, and Lhote also participated in several group shows of French Modernist artists (Sidén 2017: 17-42). André Lhote´s first more elaborate article on Cubism was published in 1917 in the Swedish magazine flam- man (the Flame), founded by Georg Pauli. The following year, the same periodical published Lhote´s detailed description of his teaching methods, which, along with the oral accounts of artists who had studied under him, was probably instrumental in persuading so many Swedish painters to choose him as their teacher. 1 For an overview of Prince Eugen’s acquisitions of art works by André Lhote and other artists, see Christina G. Wistman, Manifestation och avancemang. Eugen: konstnär, konstsamlare, mecenat och prins, PhD Thesis, Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, Gothenburg University 2008. 105 Karin Sidén, Anna Meister The Reception of André Lhote in Swedish Art History In the written overviews of Swedish Modernism and Cubism, André Lhote is often mentioned, but only briefly and not at all in correlation to his great impact as a teacher to Swedish artists for five whole decades (Sidén 2017). A possible reason for this can be found in Lhote´s reputation as an artist and in his personal interpretation of Cubism as an art movement and style. Like Gleizes and Metzinger, Lhote articu- lated his views on Cubism and how it can be classified. While Lhote ascribed him- self to “French Cubism,” which never entirely became non-figurative, and which he characterized as la nature organisée (organized nature), others, including the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, claimed that Lhote was not really a Cubist at all, at least not compared to artists like Picasso or Braque. Lhote was one of those artists who ad- opted whatever he felt to be of interest and of use in Cubism and that could be incor- porated with his striving for “lyrical deformation.” With a few exceptions, Swedish Cubism, like Lhote´s, was very modest. In Sweden, Lhote’s version of Cubism, as well as his teaching ideals, were also highly appreciated among art critics and art historians, in the 1910s and 1920s especially. Later, the reception changed, and not in favor of Lhote, who was considered to be too modest as a Cubist or not a Cubist at all in comparison to Picasso, Braque or Léger, for instance. Worth noting is the fact that at the time when Swedish artists were first discovering André Lhote as a teacher, there were several artists in Paris teaching and instructing students from around the world, including Fernand Léger, Le Fauconnier and Amedée Ozenfant. The studios of Léger and Lhote were geographically close in Montparnasse, and several artists studied with both teachers during shorter or longer periods. Fernand Legér´s influ- ence on Swedish and Nordic Cubism has been explored in detail, by art historians and in exhibition contexts, including Léger and the Nordic Countries shown in 1992 at Ateneum in Helsinki, Moderna Museet in Stockholm and at Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen (Derouet / Helleberg / Öhman 1992). Our exhibition and its adjoining catalogue from 2017, as a contrast, brought attention to a previously overlooked aspect of Swedish Cubism, and Swedish Modernism, namely that of Lhote´s importance as a teacher and influencer in the period of 1910–1960. Many years previously, in 1967, art historian Anna Lena Lindberg had submitted her unpublished but thorough study André Lhote och hans svenska elever (André Lhote and his Swedish pupils) at the Depart- 106 André Lhote’s Impact on Swedish Cubism and Modernism ment of Art History at University Lund (Lindberg 1967). In 1982, Inger Johanne Galtung Døsvig published her extensive master´s thesis Det gode maleri. André Lhotes tanker om malerkunsten (Good Painting. André Lhote´s Ideas on the Art of Painting) at Bergen University (Galtung Døsvig 1982). Galtung Døsvig also published two essays in the Swedish art history publication Konsthistorisk tid- skrift, highlighting many intriguing discoveries about Lhote´s views on Cubism as a style and movement in art (Galtung Døsvig 1983).2 Except for these studies by Lindberg and Galtung Døsvig, hardly anything has been written about André Lhote and his importance as a teacher and influencer on Swedish and other Nordic Modernist artists. In our exhibition, works by Swedish Lhote pupils were shown chronologically, starting with Georg Pauli, Prince Eugen and other artists that studied with the French painter in the 1910s, following up room by room with paintings from the 1920s up until the early 1960s. In each exhibition room we also displayed works of art by Lhote himself from each decade, making it possible for the visitors to study the stylistic influences of the teacher on his students.