Badende Mädchen

Cezanne died in 1906, and over the next few years his late paintings of bathers travelled through German exhibitions and hit the younger painters there hard. Franz Marc saw a group of them and set out to make his own scene of naked figures in a landscape. He was 30, working in the Bavarian foothills south of Munich, and the canvas he produced runs well over a metre wide. He was reaching for a single rhythm that moved through everything in a picture at once, something he was writing about in those same years. You can see it in the way the same rolling curves run through the bodies and then through the ground and trees behind them, which is what the museum in Pasadena that owns it now points visitors towards.