PROGENY

BATHING ON THE RIVER RHINE

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YSIDRA P.

So what, exactly, links me, Holger Thoss, and Paul Cézanne?

As a child, I used to go to the creek in my hometown to splash around with my friends. Oftentimes, I would wear one of my Dad’s oversized shirts over cotton briefs, an echo of the spontaneous moment in which I decided to take off my clothes and jump into the water. There is even a photo somewhere of me and friends pushing a makeshift boat along the creek, each of us in various stages of undress. We felt entirely at ease, indulging in the innocent sense of security unique to childhood.

This memory came to me when viewing Holger’s panorama of his family on the River Rhine. Children in striped boy shorts wade through the water, sometimes appearing multiple times in the same frame. They move on a kind of pilgrimage to and from the boat where the adults reside—their repeated selves tracing the stages of approach, arrival, departure, and return. I saw myself in the girl in white underwear and remembered how liberating it felt to be that comfortable, that Edenic, in my skin.

I also couldn’t help but be reminded of Cézanne’s La Barque et les Baigneurs (1890). Cézanne’s painting is also a panorama, with similar subjects and trees that define the frame's boundaries. While the figures in La Barque et les Baigneurs appear to be adults, Cézanne’s ambiguous brushwork and modulated shading democratize the human form. These ageless, genderless bodies, caught in varying moments of rest and motion, become vessels onto which the viewer can project themselves. Though both images allow for open interpretation, I feel gently guided toward a sense of prelapsarian innocence. The unabashed nakedness feels refreshing and honest, untouched by guilt or shame.

Considering Holger and Cézanne’s works, I return to the creek of my youth, to the pure joy of communing my body with nature. Art, for me, stirs something long tucked away. I haven’t returned to my hometown creek in quite some time, and the memory of studying Cézanne’s bathers in school is one retrieved from the back of my mind. Holger’s Progeny panoramas unearth these recollections for me. I can’t help but wonder if I can be the girl in the white underwear, preserve this Edenic peace as I age, and become one of Cézanne’s beings reclined by the riverside.

The Progeny panoramas give me access to the fleeting parts of my childhood. I am grateful for these moments, when I can look beyond a specific family in a specific place and relive a personal moment.

I wonder what memories this image stirs in you?

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