Three Bathers on the Beach

1909

Influenced in part by Henri Matisse, whose paintings he saw exhibited in Berlin in 1909, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner developed a radical and forceful pictorial language of flattened space, expressive figural distortion, and vivid color. This composition recalls traditional, idyllic pastorals while also reflecting his own free lifestyle at a lake near Dresden, where he relaxed and bathed nude with friends. Kirchner claimed that “the poet Walt Whitman was responsible for my outlook on life” and that Whitman’s sexually charged 1855 poem Leaves of Grass “was and still is my comfort and encouragement.” These lines from the poem seem to reflect the atmosphere of his print: “I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked, I am mad for it to be in contact with me.”