Badende Männer

Munch painted these naked men striding out of the Baltic in 1907, at a seaside resort called Warnemünde on Germany's north coast. He was drinking heavily and close to collapse, the breakdown that put him in a Copenhagen clinic came the next year, and he had thrown himself into a fashionable belief of the moment: that sun, sea and open-air nudity could rebuild a worn-out body. So these are not bathers at leisure. They stand almost monumental, planted against the light like figures of raw health, part of a group he thought of as the ages of a man's life. He has scraped and hatched the paint on their bodies until the skin looks weathered by the very sun that was supposed to heal it.