Bathers
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
KARL SCHMIDT-ROTTLUFF, 1913. OIL ON CANVAS.
In an artists colony by the Baltic Sea, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and his colleagues within the German Expressionist group Die Brücke practiced a back to nature, free love, bohemian lifestyle. Their summers were as much an extension of their avant-grade art as their paintings were, living true to the same principles they applied to canvas. Nude bathers, taking the form of anonymous and objectified female forms, blend into a landscape with few signifiers save for sparse grass and loose dune like shapes. The image intentionally reveals little, it aspires instead to a universal sensation of summertime - the deep ochre acting as an oppressive sun that coats all it touches and the grit of the brushstrokes like the coarse grains of sand against the revellers bodies. Schmidt-Rottluff’s evocative images laid the groundwork for the Expressionists that followed him but few captured a lifestyle in harmony with their art quite so potently.