Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
Bathers1913

On view:

Broad Contemporary Art Museum, floor 3

Expressionist oil painting, four nude figures in red-orange outlined in black, moving across a vivid orange background with dark green foliage

Artist or Maker: Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
Germany, 1884-1976
Title: Bathers
Date Made: 1913
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 34 1/2 × 39 1/4 in. (87.63 × 99.7 cm)
Credit Line: Gift of Josef von Sternberg
Accession Number: 46.26.3
Classification: Paintings
Collecting Area: Modern Art
Curatorial Notes: 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.
Provenance: The artist (1884- 1976). Josef von Sternberg (1894-1969), Los Angeles; given in 1946 to Los Angeles Museum of History, Science, and Art; transferred in 1961 to LACMA.
Selected Bibliography: Powell III, Earl A., Robert Winter, and Stephanie Barron. The Robert O. Anderson Building. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1986.

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