Three Bathers in the Waves by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Three Bathers in the Waves 1913

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drawing, print, linocut

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17_20th-century

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drawing

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linocut

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print

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linocut

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landscape

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german-expressionism

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linocut print

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expressionism

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nude

Copyright: Public Domain

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner made this woodcut, Three Bathers in the Waves, in Germany. Look at the way he's carved the wood to make the marks! It’s all so deliberate. The wood gives this print a really physical feel. You can almost feel the blade slicing through the grain, the texture of the block. Look at the wave breaking in the foreground. The ink isn't smooth, it's got that woodcut bite. And the way the figures are so angular, so raw, like they've been hacked out of the wood too. There’s something about those sharp angles, those slightly off-kilter shapes that feels…alive. Kirchner’s part of that Expressionist movement, where it’s all about feeling it, not just seeing it. You can see how much Kirchner admired artists like Edvard Munch, both of them wrestling with how to show inner turmoil and feeling through the way they worked with materials. It's a conversation, this art thing.

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Comments

stadelmuseum's Profile Picture
stadelmuseum over 1 year ago

Between 1908 and 1914, Kirchner often spent his summers on the Baltic Sea island of Fehmarn, which for him was tantamount to a South Sea paradise. Three slender female bathers of an almost emblematic quality romp here in the surf and become one with the formal texture of the sea. Unevenly applied with a brush, the colour heightens the impression of spontaneous movement.

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