Bathing Girls

Looking at Bathing Girls

Three figures bend and turn within a bright wooded landscape. Their bodies are built from the same curving lines as the branches, banks and water around them. Franz Marc's Bathing Girls of 1910 is a reminder that his search for a shared rhythm between living beings and nature did not begin with blue horses. The Norton Simon Museum describes the work as Marc's own response to Cézanne's bathers, shaped after he encountered an exhibition of the French painter's art. ^[1]

Watch: Franz Marc

Explore Marc’s blue horses, the Blue Rider circle and the move towards abstraction in English-language videos.

Franz Marc, Blue Horses and Der Blaue Reiter

The Canvas

An English-language introduction to Marc’s blue horses, animals, spirituality and the Blue Rider.

Watch on YouTube

▶01 · Marc and his horsesFranz Marc, Blue Horses and Der Blaue ReiterThe Canvas▶02 · The Blue RiderWho were the Blue Rider?Tate▶03 · Towards abstractionThe Case for AbstractionThe Art Assignment · PBS Digital Studios

Bodies in the landscape

The oil painting measures 109.2 × 142.2 cm and belongs to the Norton Simon Art Foundation, accession M.1968.11.P. It has a generous horizontal field, allowing figures, trees and ground to flow through one another. One bather stands at the left, another turns near the centre and a third bends at the right. Their different poses help the eye travel across the picture. The museum connects those undulating lines with an “organic rhythm” Marc wanted to find in nature. That interpretation is useful when grounded in the visible repetition of curves rather than treated as a label that explains everything. ^[1]

The subject was not unique in Marc's work. Other bathing scenes on the site belong to different pictures and should not be identified from the English title alone. This page concerns the large 1910 Norton Simon canvas, whose three principal figures and active landscape can be checked against the collection image. It is earlier than the more fractured cattle and bird paintings of 1913–14, but already gives human bodies and setting a common visual energy. ^{[1] [2]}

Its route into the collection

The museum's detailed provenance records the painting with Werner Dücker by 1911, then Franz Haniel, who donated it to a Düsseldorf museum in 1924. It remained in the city's collections until the Nazi-era removals, was offered in the 30 June 1939 Galerie Fischer sale at Lucerne and passed to Emil Georg Bührle. Dealers later brought it to London and New York; the Norton Simon Art Foundation bought it in 1968. These steps should not be collapsed into an unqualified story about the present museum. They are the documented history of this canvas. ^[1]

The painting's figures and setting give one another their shape. Follow the arc from the standing body through the trees to the bent figure, and the landscape becomes less like a backdrop and more like a shared space. The Norton Simon record is the authority for this particular canvas's title, date, scale and documented history. ^[1]