Women's Bath
Medium
drypoint
Dimensions
sheet: 53 × 38 cm · plate: 43.3 × 28.7 cm
Classification
Department
Prints
Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art
Credit
Anonymous gift in memory of Paul O. Cartun
Accession Number
1959.293
Tags
male
About this artwork
This depiction of a crowded women’s bathhouse poses the locale not as a site of erotic encounters, but as a performative circus of urban life. Max Beckmann’s cast of characters share unavoidable physical proximity in a packed, flattened space, where a fully stretched woman dives improbably from above. Beckmann was younger than the founding generation of Expressionists. He came to printmaking after serving in World War I and suffering a nervous breakdown in 1915.