Bathing Women in a Room 1908

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner made this painting, “Bathing Women in a Room,” with oils, using hot pinks and oranges against greens and yellows. I can imagine Kirchner, with his brush, trying to work out how to get the figures to come alive in this tight space; the eye jumps all over the place, trying to make sense of what's happening, and failing, which is kind of great. The paint is thin, almost translucent in places, but then thick and gloopy in others, like he couldn’t decide how much to commit. There’s a delicious tension between the different marks and the emotional tone they set. The woman sitting in the foreground is rendered with thick black lines around her eyes. What was Kirchner thinking when he did that? I think he wanted to capture something about her gaze, something about the way she sees the world. Ultimately, paintings like this are part of an ongoing conversation, where artists riff off of each other, borrowing ideas, challenging conventions, and pushing the boundaries of what painting can be.