Max Liebermann's 'At The Swimming Hole'

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What a wonderful experience I had with my family at the Dallas Museum of Art. We explored the many timeless exhibits and just hearing my children ask question after question and seeing their engagement was an experience that I am hoping to have visiting other art exhibits sooner than later. At first glance of Max Liebermann “At the Swimming Hole (Im Schwimmbad)” I was drawn into the painting by its concept of it being a look into the everyday life of a young boy in the 1870’s. Yet, having to explain to my children what exactly was going on in this picture, that in today’s age would be deemed inappropriate. The conversation with my children and this formal and stylistic analysis at that point went hand-in-hand.
Elements of Art
The artist uses warm, earth tones colors in this piece. From the colors the audience gets the feeling of it being a warm summer day and the boys in the picture are toweling off after cooling off at the local watering hole. The artist uses dark colors in the background and also a little use of shadow on the canvas behind one of the boys. This implies that the sun is over to the left of where the boys are hanging out even though there is no sun shown in the piece. It also implies that, with …show more content…

The artist displays a clear depict of the people and very relatable in the time frame in which it was paining. Even though this picture was inspired by separate sketches of the boys that he took back and began this intermittent work of art. (I would call this painted simplified reality, nothing was over emphasized or distorted which allows that real life feel to it.) Max Liebermann had a few painting that displayed the characteristics of young unclothed boys, I found online at zeno.org, (a website for German paintings) that it was easily comparable to Liebermann painting “Boy bathing in Zandvoort,1898”, because he focused on the boys in or around water in both of these oil