The Bathers

According to Marilyn S. Kushner, "Bathers was painted in 1917. It is most likely painted from a series of nudes that Russell told Mrs. [Gertrude Vanderbilt] Whitney he was working on at the time and which Louis Vauxcelles mentioned in a review of June 1917. While Russell's reliance on past masters is still evident (the nude male in the left background resembles a contorted Michelangelesque figure), he had developed a very personal figural style. This style was not based on the perfect Renaissance ideal of human proportion but rather on a more primitive or archaic concept of form. Russell remarked that he did not like the High Renaissance period of Michelangelo's paintings but preferred the later, more expressive and less balanced work..." (Morgan Russell, New York, 1990, pp. 122-23)