Tourists - Robert Lohman, c. 1969

In Tourists, Robert Lohman organizes the composition like a display board filled with people, destinations, and the ephemera of travel. The work is divided into a loose grid, but its sections are uneven and permeable. Figures press into neighboring compartments, black shapes connect separate bodies, and several objects resist a single clear identity. The image feels ordered at first glance, yet the longer we look, the more unstable it becomes.

The title gives the composition an immediate social context. These are not presented as permanent residents of a shared place. They are visitors—people passing through, looking, recording, and assembling temporary impressions. Lohman reflects that transience by reducing each person to a compressed set of signs rather than developing them as conventional portraits.

The large central figure is the most direct. Its pale oval head is enclosed within green, with a long angular nose, tiny mouth, and a small mark at the forehead. The face seems to looks upward, overwhelmed by the unfamiliar environment. The face becomes a symbol of looking itself: an anonymous traveler positioned before a world of new sights. Below it, the body is described through pale horizontal bands and a broad field of yellow complete with orange pants.

This anonymity feels appropriate to tourism. Travelers are often highly aware of their own experiences, yet to everyone around them they may appear simply as part of a crowd. Lohman captures that contradiction. Each tourist may carry a private narrative, but within the larger composition they become types.

Beside the central face is a smaller, more elaborately constructed figure. Its eyes are closed or heavily lowered, while a rounded mouth and radiating dark marks create an expression that is almost somber. A reddish patterned form sits above the head like a hat. The figure’s garment is equally distinctive. A central row of buttons, while green cuffs and a yellow collar add to the dressed quality of the man. This may be another tourist dressed for travel, but reads as a bellhop in an exotic locale.

At the upper right, a large profile is isolated within a pink rectangular field. The face turns inward toward the other figures, with a sharp nose, closed eye, and pursed lips. It feels calmer and more self-contained than the central figure, but also more detached. Because it is framed so cleanly, the profile resembles a portrait, photograph, sign, or sculpture. It most likely represents the sculpture and arts one sees on a trip.

Below this profile, another figure is reduced to a pale circular head resting on a gray-blue semicircle and a body formed from long tapering triangles. The shape could describe abstract art paired with our sculptural bust.

This slippage between figure and object is one of the work’s strongest qualities. Tourists often experience a destination through equipment and structures: cameras, signs, viewing platforms, vehicles, hotel furniture, and museum displays. Lohman allows those things to merge with the travelers themselves.

The far-left section is similarly a vignette of travel. A dark striped oval sits near the lower edge, connected by diagonal lines to a larger gray form with a rectangular opening. Above it, blue marks rise against a pale yellow field, while a triangular shape occupies the uppermost compartment. The form then becomes clearly a sight to be seen while one is traveling. 

Throughout the composition, yellow and green establish a warm, slightly faded atmosphere. These colors suggest sunlight, hotel interiors, maps, painted walls, and the washed-out appearance of older travel photographs. Blue, pink, brown, and black provide structural accents, but no single color dominates completely.

The watercolor handling is loose and translucent. Pigment gathers unevenly at the edges, producing soft borders and small variations in intensity. This gives the work the feeling of a memory rather than a precise record. The trip has been retained through fragments, but some details have already begun to blur.

Lohman’s grid provides a counterpoint to that looseness. Horizontal and vertical divisions organize the sheet like a collection of snapshots placed together in an album. Yet the sections vary dramatically in scale. A face may fill an entire compartment, while another figure is compressed beside it. This creates the sense that emotional importance, not physical distance, determines size.

The format also resembles a bank of windows. The tourists could be sitting inside a bus, train, hotel, or terminal, moving across the visions of Lohman's journey. Alternatively, they may represent separate encounters gathered from different moments in one journey. There is no single landscape linking the figures. Lohman gives us no dependable city, monument, or natural view. The destination remains absent. This is a telling choice for a work titled Tourists. The travelers and their habits become more important than the place they have traveled to see.

Created in 1969, the work belongs to a period when tourism was becoming increasingly connected to commercial aviation, packaged itineraries, modern hotels, and personal photography. Travel was no longer reserved for a small elite, and the tourist became a more familiar modern type. Lohman responds not by depicting a jet or famous landmark, but by examining the visual habits that accompanied this change.

Photography promised proof of experience: the traveler could bring home an image confirming that the journey had occurred. Yet taking a picture could also replace sustained looking. The camera records the destination while creating a barrier between the tourist and what is directly in front of them. Lohman’s compartmental design behaves almost like a series of photographs. Each section contains an isolated appearance, but the complete experience remains fragmented. The viewer receives evidence of several people and objects without being able to reconstruct the journey itself.

Within Lohman’s broader catalog, Tourists demonstrates his ability to use abstraction for social observation rather than purely private psychology. In works such as Lovers, fragmented forms communicate intimacy; in Electrism, they describe speed and overstimulation; and in The Artist in His Studio, they visualize creative accumulation. Here, the same formal freedom captures the temporary identities and divided attention of people in transit.

The human figure remains recognizable, but it is flattened into symbols, masks, clothing, and equipment. Lohman is interested less in who these people are than in how tourism changes the way they appear and behave. The title’s plural form is important. There is no central focal traveler. Instead, Lohman presents a type of collective experience. The figures differ visually, but they have been arranged within the same system of frames. Individuality survives only in fragments.

That creates an interesting relationship between seeing and being seen. Tourists travel in order to look, but they are also highly visible to others. Their clothing, cameras, gestures, and uncertainty identify them as outsiders. Lohman turns the observers into the observed. The viewer occupies a similar position. We look across the sheet as though scanning a crowd, quickly assigning identities to simplified forms. In doing so, we repeat the same process of visual categorization that the work may be questioning.

Tourists is not about a particular vacation or destination. It is about the strange state of being temporarily displaced—surrounded by unfamiliar things, eager to record them, and reduced in the eyes of others to a recognizable type. Lohman presents travel as a collage of looking, posing, collecting, and remembering, with each person becoming one more image inside the larger album.