Badeanstalt (Bathing Place) 1919

Lovis Corinth made this etching, Badeanstalt, capturing a bathing place, sometime between the late 19th and early 20th century. The scene feels so active, captured with such loose, almost frenetic mark-making. I imagine Corinth standing there, maybe with a stick of charcoal or a pen, just furiously trying to get it all down. The people bathing are rendered as skeletal, like quick notations of human form, sitting and standing, as if the artist is trying to distill their essence. It feels so in the moment, so fleeting. Like a memory half-recalled. I wonder, did he struggle to capture the energy of the scene? Did he labour over this or did it just flow out of him? There's something about the way he’s scratched the lines into the plate, a kind of raw immediacy, which reminds me of other German Expressionists like Kirchner or Heckel. They all seem to be searching for a way to express the intensity of modern life. It is like a painter is trying to find truth through gesture, through the body's knowledge.