Women's Bath

Discussion

FROM THE CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART’S CATALOG

This depiction of a crowded women’s bathhouse poses the locale not as a site of erotic encounters, but as a performative circus of urban life. Max Beckmann’s cast of characters share unavoidable physical proximity in a packed, flattened space, where a fully stretched woman dives improbably from above. Beckmann was younger than the founding generation of Expressionists. He came to printmaking after serving in World War I and suffering a nervous breakdown in 1915.

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