Karl Schmidt-Rottluff painted Bathers during a trip to Nidden (Nida), a resort village near the Baltic sea and the location of a famous artist’s colony. The subject of nudes in a landscape—typically objectified, anonymous female bodies—was popular with Schmidt-Rottluff and his colleagues in the German Expressionist group Die Brücke (The Bridge). These artists often spent summers at the Moritzburg lakes or on the island of Fehmarn to engage in a back-to-nature, bohemian life- style as a part of their avant-garde artistic identity.

Here, Schmidt-Rottluff integrates the figures within the surrounding landscape through color; the exaggerated palette of the ground is repeated on the figures’ skin. There is only the slightest hint of a location—strands of green suggest the sparse grasses that dot the beach dunes—but the predominance of orange and red and the pebbled texture of the unprimed canvas evoke the sensations of the seaside setting: the warmth of the summer sun, and the gritty texture of the sandy beach.

Wall label, 2021.