The Bathers 1934

Mark Rothko made this gouache painting of bathers on paper at an undetermined time. Rothko's work is often seen as divorced from social context, but the motif of bathers in the landscape has a long history, particularly within the French academic tradition. The image before us evokes paintings by artists such as Cézanne, whose own bathers were a self-conscious attempt to grapple with the canon of European painting. This was at a time when the institutional structures of art were being challenged by new avant-garde movements. Rothko would have been very aware of this history. He later moved away from figuration, but in works like this we can still see him wrestling with questions about the place of the artist, and the social function of art, that preoccupied many of his contemporaries. To better understand this, we can look at the writings of art critics and historians, and delve into the archives of museums and galleries that promoted his work. Rothko’s art gains deeper meaning when understood in its specific social and institutional context.