With this work, the Bordeaux artist André Lhote tried to renew his approach to the major theme of the Bathers, which he had already worked on in previous studies.
Here, he has designed a frieze composition punctuated by a succession of vertical coloured planes running through the bodies of the bathers. The use of a thick line synthesises the design and disassociates the different colours from one another. The flat blocks of colour and the angular forms of certain parts of the bodies, recalls the cubist language adopted by Lhote from 1912 onwards. And so, it’s no coincidence if the painter refers to Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon in several of his paintings of sailors and prostitutes.
A theorist, Lhote loved to explain his painting. Observing the presence of geometry and the golden number everywhere in nature, he believed that painters must echo its established order. In some ways, this work can be seen as a manifesto for Lhote’s thoughts on cubism.
