Bathing Men

In the summer of 1907 Munch went to Warnemünde, a small resort on Germany's Baltic coast, to recover, and rented a fisherman's house close to the sea. On that beach he took up a new subject, the naked male body, and this canvas followed the next year. Two men stand facing us on the sand, their bodies a hot yellow against a band of dark blue water, while behind them a third throws himself into the surf with his arms flung wide. A photograph from those months shows the painter working on the shore with palette and brush, a nude model posing behind him. This version was meant for an exhibition at the Kunstsalon Clematis in Hamburg, and it never got further than the gallery's cellar. Gustav Schiefler, a Hamburg judge who collected his prints, wrote to him that naked men were still unusual.