The Brooklyn Rail

Dear Graham,

I’ve been meaning to write to you about The Bather with Outstretched Arms (1980–81) ever since John and Laurie Adams gave it to the National Gallery ten years ago. Sorry for the delay.

First, blue is not my favorite color, not even close. I can tell you that now. Still, this might be my favorite painting from my favorite series of yours. I love being around water, and this painting is all water. Your bather is bathing in blue and bathed by blue. Nel blu dipinto di blu. It’s a blue warmed and reddened by the early morning sun, almost violet on her sun-raked back and in the upper panels, “a blue beyond the rainy hyacinth” (Wallace Stevens, Sea Surface Full of Clouds). It makes me think of another bath-painting of a different color, Helen Frankenthaler’s A Green Thought in a Green Shade, finished the same year. (Her title is from Andrew Marvell’s poem The Garden.) Or Matisse’s Red Studio (1911), with its recently confirmed underlayers of blue, pink, ochre, and green. Monochrome is rarely simple, whether your bath is a sea, a garden, or a studio.

I bathe with your bather. With her back turned, she becomes my surrogate. I enter the water with her—imagine balancing with her on that lumpy yellow rock. Will we keep our balance? The arms can only do so much once the trunk starts to go. I can picture exactly how we will fall. It’s an exciting moment, one that no doubt triggers unconscious memories of learning to walk, to find our balance in the world. I get a similar feeling from your many bathers pulling their tops on or off. Yes, I know that the image comes from the rear figure in Piero’s Baptism, which you love, but the gesture also memorializes another life skill that we all have to master as kids, just like tying our shoes. Art historian Jack Flam takes things farther back still, imagining the red shirt in Bather III (1979) as “a kind of placenta” and the woman caught in the middle of pulling it over her head (whether on or off is not clear) as “a kind of latter-day Venus struggling to be born.” You once said, “The act of putting on a shirt isn’t so dissimilar to the act of trying to make an image.... The idea of the work itself is struggling to be released.” Baptism and birth.

One thing that helps the National Gallery bather keep her balance is abstraction. Her fingertips barely touch the edges of the rectangle that frames her, one of five joined panels that form the support of the painting, as if she is bracing herself or being braced, the figurative braced by the abstract. This bare touching reminds me of the way Leonardo’s so-called Vitruvian Man just touches the circle and square that circumscribe him. I am not the first person to make this connection: painter and critic Alexi Worth suggested the same thing of the next painting in the series, Bather with Outstretched Arms II (1983), whose figure he called “a blonde granddaughter of Leonardo’s geometrical man.” Same model, same rock, but she faces us and barely teeters at all, which makes the Leonardo connection clearer. The brushwork is tighter, the sun higher, the bather ready to go in her suit and cap. She has her act together, which is why I like ours better.

Another source image, one that you make plain in your title—I don’t think you ever trusted us to get the sources right—is Cezanne’s Bather with Outstretched Arms (c. 1878, several versions). Even though Cezanne’s bather faces us, he feels more connected to the National Gallery painting than to your second version because he too is having balance issues. His arms assume that same banking-airplane pose as he navigates the bumpy shore along the water’s edge, or a hill above the water. He wears similarly unflattering white undies.

I love your gall in bringing these two precursors together, the one as perfect as the other is imperfect, Vitruvian Man and Captain Underpants. The anatomy and foreshortening of Cezanne’s bather is all wrong, but despite the “incorrect” drawing, or because of it, we get a strong kinesthetic sense of what it feels like to keep one’s balance, to steady one’s self. Cezanne’s other male bather, the famous one with arms akimbo at The Museum of Modern Art, has no such problem. But I prefer the awkward anti-hero, the one whose arms windmill the clouds, exploring the ether. I am reminded of de Kooning’s quote from a 1951 interview: “If I stretch my arms next to the rest of myself and wonder where my fingers are—that is all the space I need as a painter.” Actually, I think you needed more space, a lot more.

It’s time to wrap this letter up. Piero is probably waiting for you at the dinner table with some of the other apostles. I hope the two of you are enjoying, in the words of Andrew Marvell, “far other worlds, and other seas.”

Your admirer,

Harry