By Luciano Migliaccio
A letter from Lhote to P. M. Bardi indicates that the Composition – Three Female Nudes canvas was painted in 1920 and that several variations of the same work were made by changing the color combinations. The Musée National d’Art Moderne of Paris conserves a large-format painting, approximately five meters wide, dated 1925, that represents Lhote’s final version of a work based on a series of sketches. The canvas at the Paris museum features six female nudes. The Masp work Composition – Three Female Nudes was inspired more by Cézanne’s Bathers than by Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon of 1907 which introduced a form of Cubism imbued with primitivism and African art, and which had already become outdated by 1920. After the pioneer phase of the vanguard, Lhote took up silent research into Cézanne, seen as a renovator of a French national tradition originated by Poussin. Lhote’s return to Cézanne assumed monumental dimensions in his canvas of 1925. Here the reference to Classical tradition is visible in the pose of the nudes on the right and the left side of the composition, obviously inspired in Michelangelo’s frescoes at the Sistine Chapel. Like Cézanne, Lhote experimented with the possibilities of spatial composition based on sensorial data, while bearing in mind the fusion of plane, space, and figure proposed by Picasso and Braque’s Cubism. “Everything must be placed in the same plane in the artist’s spirit”. Matisse advised. In this composition Lhote approaches Matisse and some post-Cubist variations by Severini, who was then seeking to renovate the monumental tradition of Italian painting.

— Luciano Migliaccio, 1998

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