Ferdinand Erfmann artwork • painting • for sale Sunbather

Erfmann's main subject was women: sturdy factory girls, sportswomen, bathers and prostitutes with broad hips and muscular arms and legs. Erfmann himself called them 'mastodons'. He used a flat, naive-realistic style for its depiction, which eliminates the suggestion of natural movement and emphasizes their monumentality. He said his preference for these figures stemmed from childhood trauma: his dominant father hated these kinds of women. It expressed itself in dozens of paintings and hundreds of drawings with this subject. His ideal image hardly changed over the years, although after 1930 he limited himself to one or at most two figures. His painting technique consisted of making an underdrawing which he carefully filled in with paint. The resulting style had interfaces with the new realism, which came into vogue from the end of the 1920s.