  About the Artwork
  
  
  In Bathers, two nude women tower over a hilly landscape. One of them stands in shallow waters with a slight turn to her left, while the other crouches on the grassy ground, exposing her body in profile. Otto Mueller sketched them summarily, the silhouettes of their bodies reinforced with thick gray and bluish outlines against the golden hue of their sun-bathed skin. Inspired early on by Pompeian wall paintings and Egyptian murals, which he had encountered in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, Mueller integrated the structure of the coarse canvas into the surface of this composition to approximate an effect of a mural painting. The subject of bathers was one to which he returned numerous times in paint, drawing, and print. 

Mueller joined the expressionist collective Die Brücke (The Bridge) in 1910, several years after its 1905 founding. After the dissolution of Die Brücke in 1913, Mueller continued his contacts with former members, especially Erich Heckel, with whom he struck up a deep friendship. In the early 1920s, Mueller and Heckel spent time visiting each other at locations on the Baltic Sea, a possible setting of this work.
  
  
  Title
  Bathers
  
  
  Artwork Date
  ca. 1920
  
  Artist
  Otto Mueller
  
  
  
  Life Dates
  1874-1930
  
  
  
  
  Nationality
  
  
  
  Please note:
  Definitions for nationality may vary significantly, depending on chronology and world events.
  Some definitions include:
  Belonging to a people having a common origin based on a geography and/or descent and/or tradition and/or culture and/or religion and/or language, or sharing membership in a legally defined nation.
  
  
  
  German
  
  
  
  Culture
  
  
  
  Please note:
  Cultures may be defined by the language, customs, religious beliefs, social norms, and material traits of a group.
  
  
  
  
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  Medium
  Oil on canvas
  
  
  Dimensions
  Unframed: 37 1/4 × 31 inches (94.6 × 78.7 cm)
  Framed: 42 1/4 × 35 7/8 × 1 15/16 inches (107.3 × 91.1 × 4.9 cm)
  
  
  Classification
  Paintings
  
  
  Department
  European Modern Art to 1970
  
  
  Credit
  City of Detroit Purchase
  
  
  
  Accession Number
  
  
  
  This unique number is assigned to an individual artwork as part of the cataloguing process at the time of entry into the permanent collection.
  Most frequently, accession numbers begin with the year in which the artwork entered the museum’s holdings.
  For example, 2008.3 refers to the year of acquisition and notes that it was the 3rd of that year. The DIA has a few additional systems—no longer assigned—that identify specific donors or museum patronage groups.
  
  
  
  21.210
  
  
  Copyright
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