Andre Lhote (1885-1962) French painter, critic and teacher. Born in Bordeaux, France, he was apprenticed by his father as a maker of wood-carvings from the tender age of 12. He followed the course in decorative arts at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux, and did not definitively abandon ornamental sculpture for painting until 1905. Perhaps as a consequence, Lhote was one of the few 20th-century artists and theoreticians who not only accepted the term ‘decorative’ in connection with art but also exalted it, finding in mural painting the highest public realization of his ambitions. Like Albert Gleizes and Fernand Leger, he welcomed the limitations of wall painting because its conditions insisted on flatness as integral to a large plane surface. He died in Paris in 1962.