bathing girls

Bathing Girls (1910), now in the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, is an unusual work in Franz Marc's oeuvre, featuring human rather than animal subjects at a point when he was moving decisively toward animals as his primary symbolic vehicles. The subject connects to a long European tradition of female nude bathing scenes, from Renoir's riverside bathers to Cézanne's monumental Bathers series. Marc's engagement with this tradition in 1910 suggests he was still working out his relationship to figurative painting conventions before fully committing to the animal-centred vision that would make his reputation. The Norton Simon's holding reflects American institutional collecting of European modernism already active in the early twentieth century. By 1911 Marc had largely abandoned human subjects in favour of the animal world he considered spiritually superior, making Bathing Girls a document of his final engagement with the figurative tradition he was leaving behind, and a revealing

The figures are treated in Marc's 1910 transitional manner: simplified, colour-heightened, and beginning to merge with their setting. The handling shows the same tendency toward expressive simplification and intensification of colour beyond naturalistic observation that simultaneously drives his