Large Bathers 1905

Paul Cézanne’s "Large Bathers" at the Barnes Foundation, a painting without a precise date, invites you to swim in its blurry, blue-green, peachy world. Imagine Cézanne wrestling with this scene, the figures emerging not as perfect forms but as built structures, like painting a house! He's thinking about form, sure, but also about how we see, how light bounces off the skin and those drapes. He builds the figures using color, patch by patch, a pink here, a dab of green there, which is an optical jumble. And then consider those awkward poses, the ones that feel so… human. Cézanne’s bather paintings were very influential to Picasso and Matisse, you know. Artists are always looking, borrowing, stealing, and dreaming from one another. These paintings are a reminder that art is about feeling your way through, one brushstroke at a time. The painting is not really about bathers, it's about the act of painting!