Expressionist Primitivism

African primitivism is a Western invention.

Germany was late among the European nations encountering and absorbing the meaning of dealing with more primitive peoples, those significantly less economically and culturally developed than they were, in that the primitive peoples were preliterate, even if, ironically, millennia before, as Tacitus attests, the Germans had been the barbarians who were confronted by the much more advanced Romans. The first invasion was the Spanish Conquest of South and Central America where Spain took gold from South and Central America and exported to that area its authoritarian religion and political administration. The English a century later extirpated the natives rather than turn them into peons so as to use the land for agriculture and so settled their own families into a group of English commonwealths even if they were chartered by an English king or nobleman. The French went farther afield, to Polynesia, exporting their language and culture and marveling, as Diderot did, at the freedoms these people had far from France, just as de Tocqueville, later on, thought was the case when contemplating the United States. More difficult to manage was Algeria, so close by and treated as a department of France, given that the Muslim world was not as far behind the Europeans in their culture and organization though, at the time, falling ever behind the Europeans in the clash of civilizations. The Germans, Johnny come latelies, only had a few puny colonies in Africa, but had become very conscious of primitive peoples. Germans romanticized American Indians in Karl May’s novels and in the Twentieth Century Germans filled their imagination with African people, as was clear in Expressionist art, and including up to the Sixties when Leni Riefenstahl did her unfinished documentary, The Black Cargo.

Double Portrait S. and L., Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, 1925, Museum Ostwall

A good way to begin in understanding the German take on African culture is to look at Karl Schmidt-Rottluff’s Double Portrait S. and L. from about 1925. The two figures are very different. One on the left has wide eyes and a reddish coloring uneven over the face which makes the nose mostly hidden in that color but outlined in green. While the figure on the right has narrow eyes and whose blue patches on the face also extend to the nose but so as to accentuate the nose because the blue is lighter and shaded with gray, it is possible to say that the two figures are portraits that are deliberately made ugly or that they evoke different moods, red for anger, perhaps, and blue associated with sadness. To say that is to speculate or read something in, like making a Beethoven symphony into a story, as people did in the late Nineteenth Century.

What can be accurately said is that the two faces are made into or clad with masks which might either hide or represent feeling, people elusive as they are present, a way of being faces different from a more traditional portrait that aims at accuracy and beauty both at the same time, as with Sargent, who had just died after his very long career. Here, instead, are disquieting and exaggerated presences so that the inner workings are elusive while the face, at least one of them, stare at the viewers in the face, each being what they inevitably are because they can be nothing other. The figures are not seen with x-ray vision or through interpretation or empathy but through how colors make people the ways they essentially are, and so it makes sense to think of masks, just as exist in African style because the mask also makes the person fierce or angry or just impressive because of its exaggerations and so the inner feeling is transmitted from the outside, from the appearances and, also is made rigid and guarded, as if the face could no longer be pliable or plastic but instead, like masks with which people cannot dispense. People of these sorts are rigid and the nature of color, a universal attribute, means they cannot be removed. Once seen, a face as a mask, never remembered. I do not have pleasure in seeing these faces but I appreciate them as existing in a kind of being which eludes their humanity while telling their harsh truths about how people can look and be looked at.

Three Nudes in the Forest, Otto Mueller, 1911

A more straightforward view of primitive Africans is presented by Otto Mueller who does many nudes of women in the forest, the bodies brown rather than black, as well as dual portraits of clothed African women. The style is clear in his Three Nudes in the Forest of 1911. The three, one seated, one standing full front, and the third to the side, are stylized in shape and color. Shadow and light are shown  by yellow tones, while most of the bodies are light brown. The features in the faces are sketchy, the breasts are small, and the vaginas are dark but not prominent. The forest is just a background of green foliage though you can see ferns and trees.The three figures are arranged so that the postures set one another off, as if they were exercises preparing for a portrait rather than the portrait itself. The painting can be compared to Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, near enough in time, from 1907, in that the figures are abstract and play against one another as if in a ballet pose. The objects are shapes rather than express meaning or personality or even sensuality, just their nudity. This is very far away from Renoir who tries to get the skin of his nudes just right so as to convey the beauty and sensuality of these women.

Two Sisters, Otto Mueller, undated

Mueller’s Two Sisters (undated) is very different even if it uses the same colors. The two girls have distinct faces, one with more open eyes than the other, but similar enough to show they are sisters. They are wearing modern dress even if rather unadorned and drab, in yellow and green, as is the green background. None of the brightness of color and elaborate dress found in Sargent, but poised, as suits, I would say, women acculturated to the West whatever their origins. Again, however, their busts are modest and their hair not highly dressed. The figures are distinct enough to make a viewer wonder what these people are like, which is remarkable enough in that these African figures are not just examples of a style, but individualized, and so like real people. Noteworthy, however, is that the trios and quartets of Africans, presumably because they are brown rather than just an arcane color, are put with indistinguishable backgrounds, brown or green and so suggesting foliage or sand but given little perspective and so like wallpaper, flat with a mood or design, and so very different where by Frederic Church, for example, the American artist half a century before, provides vistas so as to see foreign sites and flora and not just the abstracted people in their abstracted settings. The accomplishment of those expressionists make the shapes and the envelopment of setting as making the paintings about color and shape rather than factuality. Max Pechstein does present African natives in canoes just off a village but the anthropological and biological data is subsumed by the fanciful idea that the figures are nude when native peoples wore loincloths, just a fantasy of primitive life as au natural.

Early Morning, Max Pechstein, 1911

These new Expressionist conventions apply beyond the African scene. There is Max Pechstein’s Early Morning from 1911, which is a nude of a blue woman, something like from the movie Avatar, where blue is a natural color for a person, and has the usual sensuous and heavy lines even if her breasts are ample and oval rather than small and pointed and her stomach is large. Kirschner also does nudes in strange colors: whitish, or green, or many nude figures by other Expressionists in one or another brown to show, perhaps, that brown is a natural color for people.  

This leads to a new meaning for the primitive. It means elemental or basic, which in art means getting rid of fancy and civilized conventions like realism or perspective and getting back to the ways in which natives engaged in seeing before the civilized accouterments. In the pictures cited, that meant an emphasis on line and color and no distinction between foreground and background. Expressionists also engaged in presenting small patches of color that undid perspective by showing townscapes with a blur of glare infested places and so truer to experience than even the representations by Monet.

Red Houses, Erich Heckel, 1905

A good example of the Expressionist distinctive use of color is in Expressionist townscapes which avoid fidelity of representation to accomplish a fidelity of the way minds consider color. Erich Heckel’s Red Houses, from 1905, presents a number of houses next to one another which are each in a shade of red, those themselves not well matched but instead having their own qualities as well as adding up to a field of reddishness where the shade of red seems to go beyond the lines of the outline of the individual buildings so as to compass a reddish mass punctuated by blue blobs to indicate windows and all behind a field of dirty green. So this and other Expressionist art abandon the impressionist regularity of working within the lines as well as Whistler presenting swaths of black that emphasize the solidity and spatial dimensions of a bridge. Rather, what Heckel and others capture is a picture before it is straightened out by its conventions to become a representational one but are the experienced blotches not yet intellectually configured, primitive rather than abstract as if first seen before being attended to as a picture. The Expressionists try to imagine, like Kant, what experience is like before formed through the dimensions of time and space, and it is blobs of color.

A way to draw ideas about German Expressionism comes from looking at then contemporary American Negros who, after all, had to manage over the generations to overcome the cultural disparities that came from bringing people in a pre-literate culture forced into slavery and then into Emancipation and then into being part of the American mainstream. Alain Locke a philosopher and a student of the shifting Negro condition, said in The New Negro from 1925 that “African art is rigid, controlled, disciplined, abstract, [while] Afroamerican art is free, exuberant, emotional, sentimental, and humane”. Use these contrasting terms to describe Expressionist Primitivism. The authentically old was formalistic, distancing and scary while the Modernist take on Primitivism was fluid, with elongated rather than sharp shapes, colorful rather than monochromatic, and Romantic in its spirit of abandoning to the primitive rather than overcoming it with news gods and fiats. The plasticity of the self is a modern rather than a primitive invention and that is why, from Mary Shelley to Fritz Lang, it is about the future.

The Biden Withdrawal

Three incumbent Presidents in my lifetime decided not to run for another term, and they did so because they couldn't get reelected, however much Biden may be praised for doing the patriotic thing, which was also the truth.  Harry Truman said he wouldn't run in 1952 because he couldn't get a good enough deal to end the Korean War and because McCarthyite accusations against him had hurt him. Eisenhower had a clean slate. He took the available deal on Korea and bided his time to finish off McCarthy. LBJ declined to run because he could not get a negotiated settlement with North Vietnam and because Eugene McCarthy had nearly beaten LBJ in the New Hampshire Democratic Primary. Biden had to resign the nomination even though the polls with Trump remained close because he was told the polls were bad in the swing states and that the Democratic donors had dried up.

Moreover, there is plenty of time to shift to Kamala as leader. Remember that the entire British election season lasts just six weeks from the time the election is called until it is decided and Kamala will continue Biden's policies both foreign and domestic and can face Trump on the issues of abortion,and Ukraine in a lively manner, asking Trump in  a debate why Trump never criticizes Putin and that Trump is responsible for overturning Roe v. Wade. 

Another thought. Harris' vp nominee will have to be a white male so as to balance the ticket. even though the obvious choice would be someone from a battleground state, which means Wisconsin , Michigan or Pennsylvania. Gov. Evers of Wisconsin is just not mentioned as a heavy hitter. That leaves out Gov. Whitmer of Michigan and Sen. Klobuchar of Minnisota, but not Gov. Newsom of California. He is a heavy hitter but might be willing to take the job because, as the expression goes, it puts him one heartbeat away from the Presidency. LBJ made the same decision and not just to get Texas' electoral votes, though Sam Rayburn mentioned it as did JFK. The trouble with Gov. Shapiro of Pennsylvania is that it would make the Harris-Shapiro ticket too Jewish. Under Kamala, the spouse of the President would be Jewish. Harris's step-daughters refer to her as "mamala". That nearly happened once before because the wife of Michael Dukakis was Jewish and people asked her if she would put up the White House Christmas tree and she said she would. Harris's step-daughters refer to her as "mamala". So no Shapiro as vp. Sen. Mark Kelley of Arizona seems a good choice.

Biden Bounces Back

But his nomination isn’t secure.

American voters will have to engage in a bit of discernment in choosing which nominee to decide to be President in November. In the past, they could vote on relative charm or whether the economy was doing well, knowing that whomever was elected would have been a responsible President and so not a crucial choice. But not this time.

If Biden had flubbed yesterday during his post NATO Summit Meeting press conference the way he had in his debate with Trump and his interview with George Steponopolis, then Nancy Pelosi and some other senior Democrats could have had the distasteful duty of  going to the White House and telling Biden that he could no longer do the job and give way to either Kamala Harris or a short list of articulate, vigorous and well experienced Governors for the Chicago delegates to choose as standard bearer. But that is not what happened. Biden was strong in offering a comprehensive view of foreign policy. He explained the reason for and accomplishment of a strong NATO to fend off the America Firsters who had not infiltrated into the Republican Party since Pearl Harbor, pointing out that internationalism included both Ronald Rdeagan and himself. He turned a question of whether he was able to negotiate with foreign leaders into describing that he had restored talks with China and that at the moment there was nothing to talk about with Putin who is not willing to budge on his war aims against Ukraine despite the very high casualties to Russia and a loss of land in Ukraine controlled by Russia. Biden also mentioned that he had strengthened the Pacific Rim allies and so was controlling China and  economically punishing Chinese cooperation with Russia.Biden also said that managing Israel was difficult because it had the most conservative  government it had, his own involvement going back to the time of Golda Meir. Biden also managed to point out that at home  employment was up and inflation down and illegal immigration seriously lessened because of his own executive orders. Quite a good performance.

But here is where the discernment comes in. Biden’s voice is weak. He sometimes has to wait a few seconds to recover a word he is looking for, something familiar to myself during advanced age. He sometimes garbles his words or stutters. He is clearly an old man and so need to notice that his knowledge of the facts and ideas remain clear and decisive. He knows what he thinks, has thought through the issues, rather than offering canned statements. Don’t worry about  teleprompters that are used by both candidates. He is an active and acute observer of what is going on and people should notice that if they put aside his  elderly mannerisms. 

The media will over the next four months have a lot of influence in helping the voters to discern what is the differences between reality and appearance, not something required in past elections where voters could choose differences between policy, character or party affiliation. Will the media dwell on Biden’s verbal lapses or attend to the fact that he knows what he is talking about? That could make the difference. An even greater challenge to the media is how to handle Trump, whose test begins soon enough this coming Monday at the Republican Convention in Milwaukee. Commentators have already taken the role of fact checking Trump but will they do it aggressively enough tyo show he lies all the time about anything and that what he says are assertions rather than evidence or arguments, which seems a mental failure of his that goes very far back and so is not the result of aging.

The most important questions to face Trump or his spokespeople starting now is why he has never provided evidence of a rigged election, or why he hid and lied about secret documents and what right he had to ask Georgia to give him the votes needed for him to win the vote in the stage. He and they can claim Trump can’t say because these matters are in the courts, but that doesn’t wash. He is offering himself to be President of the United States not just in jeopardy of being a jailbird.  He can be asked to meet a higher standard, that of public opinion. Ask on the Sunday programs why there are no explanations of these various issues and why is he delaying the process for possibly exonerating himself? The ball is in his court and evading the issues makes him seem guilty, which is reason enough not to vote for him, as well as for his general demeanor of meanness and his plans to overthrow democracy. Commentators may be willing to discuss the 2025 Project but find it distasteful to deal with Trump’s personal character, every president, like Richard Nixon, given a clean shave for his past character once assuming President because it is so distasteful to deal with negative personal qualities. Bjut why shouldn’t they ask? Newspapermen looked into Gary Hart’s personal life and undid  him  as a candidate. Why not ask why revenge isn’t always a bad thing or that diminishing an opponent’s stature by remarking on his small hands or his wife’s appearance diminishes himself rather than the people he tries to belittle. Media people will have to wade into personalities when they try to avoid thinking verbal flubs are evidence but smearing is beneath their dignity when it is the most obvious evidence before them.

We will see next week how the media handle Trump. That could be decisive.

What Democrats Should Do

Biden should pass the torch.

The debate last Thursday was not as awful for Biden as it was perceived because the commentators dealt with Biden’s weak delivery rather than the lies offered and the revenge promised by Trump. the commentators did not deal with the essence which was that, rather than the shitshow predicted, the two contestants made clear what they believed: that the other one was the worst president ever and a liar and sending America to ruin. That clarified things and the electorate can decide which one is correct. More cynical people I know just think that they are both a disgrace, while I think that Biden, even though he has a weaker voice, was correct on the issues and his own propriety.  If Biden wins, the worst that can happen if he becomes a figurehead President, just like George W. Bush. Biden would continue his policies and points of view backed by a strong cabinet while a Trump victory is a disaster for the Constitution. People will see that out-- or so I think.

But people have acted differently and many now seen Biden as unequipped to be President because of his infirmities rather than his wise and agile management of government given the divided populace and organs of government while treating Trump’s bluster as not really meaning what he says, which is to create internment camps for millions of people, get revenge against his political enemies by politicizing the Justice Department and making most civil servants into political decisions an d to replace taxes with tariffs, which would lead  to a Great Depression. What can be done to stop Trump? An interview with George Srephanopolis is not likely to restore Biden’s support and important Democratic leaders as well as media leaders think it time to make a turn. Movement is occurring quickly as was the case when England considered  a surrender to Hitler at the time of Duunkirk and I do not exaggerate the menace a second term for Trump would be to the American Constitution.

I suggest the following plan. The leading Democrats would orchestrate a pageant at the Chicago Convention next month when, Biden having announced he will not run, three or four likely contenders, such as Harris, Klobuchar, Newsome and Whitmer, will present speeches saying that Biden has gone far but like Moses will not enter the promised land but will continue his policies in his name and then  the delegates will jostle with one another about which one will be the standard bearer. (I eliminate Buttigig because Trump will make gayness the issue, but then again, I didn’t think Obama would get elected in 2008 because he was Black. So I could be wrong and Mayor Pete has proven himself an excellent cabinet secretary, having mastered the intricacies of transportation, which are considerable.) Biden might agree with this plan to have an exit with glory, deified while still alive. When Hubert Humphrey, having been defeated by Nixon, returned to the Senate and soon found out to have terminal cancer, he received many tributes from his colleagues about his accomplishments. Rather than thinking this morbid, Humphrey said he loved it. Politicians are like opera singers. They love applause.

There would also be advantages to the nation. Remember that Lyndon Johnson got large majorities in Congress in the 1964 election because of the assassination of John F. Kennedy the previous year. That allowed Johnson to pass major civil rights legislation. A similar tribute to Biden as the person worn down from his long political endeavors might give the Democrats enough election wins that they could pass civil rights and voting rights bills as well as legislation on the border, the electorate a bit guilty at  heaving Biden out now that he was ousted. Such is the nature of popular political feeling. At least we will be rid of Trump and can hope that the Republicans can return themselves into being a conservative rather than  Populist party. That may be wishing too much, but the future can be formed through good wishes rather than dire forebodings.

Expressionist Consciousness

Expressionism concerns the autonomy of consciousness and that issue runs deep in the German psyche.

Expressionism was a short lived art movement mostly in Germany in the three decades before, during, and after the First World War that included figures like Eric Nolde and Ernst Kirschner and Otto Dix though some art critics stretch the term to include some Picasso (who, after all, tried a bit of everything), El Greco’s “View of Toledo” (which was religiously inspired while Expressionists were not) and Vincent Van Gogh (who used bright colors and so was very different from Expressionists). The idea of Expressionism, critics generally agree, is that it was an attempt to externalize the feelings within people rather than to accurately portray what the external world looked like. That is true as far as it goes, but that does not explain how the actual features of the art convey the apparently other-worldly and cynical view of the scenes represented and what places them in the social context of Germany at that time. Go back to the elements employed in these paintings of Eric Ludwig Kirshner, the movement’s most central figure, to answer the question. 

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Berlin Street Scene, 1913-14, Neue Galerie

Here is Kirshner’s “Berlin Street Scene” from 1915, one of his many presentations of fancy ladies, some of them prostitutes, but not in this painting. These are sophisticated people. The look still predates the Flapper Age, with its short skirts and tiny bosoms, but the women are able to look classy, what with their well tailored dresses, both vividly red and blue, and with fancy hats. The women have shadowed eyes and pale faces while a man among them is smoking a cigarette, a sign of liberation from conventionality, as is the straightforward gazes of the women. Aesthetically pleasing and a bit different is that the red dress is to be contrasted with so many men and women dressed in blue, these accented with yellow highlights. What is the significance of this presentation?

Adopting Barrington Moore Jr.’s view that democracy proceeds from West to East and stymied by the remaining presence of a peasant class, industrialization also moved West to East and was more unsettling as it became ever more abrupt. English industrialization was home grown and developed in the Eighteenth Century when the steam engine allowed  for efficient coal mining and common people flocked to the cities to get jobs in the new industries. France did not make that transformation until Louis Philippe, the bourgeois king, and Russia did not industrialize until the Twentieth Century, while the change over in Germany, the marvel of it, was the generation before the First World War. Berlin was a young and adventurous city. The point about these sophisticated Berlin women was that Berlin had emerged rapidly in the last generation as a world class city replete with the most advanced Western culture and the latest trends and fashions accompanied with a subway and an electricity driven montage of lighted ads and internal combustion engine autos.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Street, Dresden, 1908 (reworked 1919; dated on painting 1907), Museum of Modern Art

Look more deeply than to the audacious contemporary of  “Berlin Street Scene” by turning to Kirschner’s “Street, Dresden '' from 1906. Rather than the later sarcastic view of women primping and showing off in their pointed angularity, a comment about fashion and being fashionable, the earlier painting tries to get to the experience of what it is to meet people on the street. The essential quality of those people encountered is that they are fleshy rather than fleshed out. They are people caught in passing for a moment and so no more than dots of eyes on doughty faces, these distinguished by different skin shades even if we would all consider them white, some of them pale and some yellowish and some more red. The oval faces make them all somehow familiar even if they are strangers to others and by implication to themselves, people knowing others see us as strangers on the street.

It is also important to look at the color of the dresses in “Street, Dresden”. As with skin tone, the painting is more realistic than an Impressionist point of view might imagine them to be. One woman wears a striking yellow jacket over her blue skirt. The dress is partly continued by the yellow theme in another part of the painting but that does not dissuade the viewer from seeing the color scheme as disjointed and a bit ugly, perhaps because the jacket is not quite pure yellow, the dress admixed to make it a bit off. The dresses of the adjoining women have red dresses that are also not primary and somehow clash with the other dresses. This seems realistic rather than as is usually thought as the imposition by Expressionists by strange and clashing colors because, in fact, people do not wear their clothes to coordinate with the people they will meet. The actual scene is of whatever collection of colors is a happenstance and so a jumble.

The colors used in Kirshner and other Expressionists  is akin to what happens in architecture. Yes, there were planned residences in Berlin at the time just as the design for the apartments in Bath, England had been designed to provide a unified presentation of an oval of similar heighted houses. That provided a very pleasing environment. The same thing happened when the Lincoln Center area in New York was razed so as to build a set of coordinated buildings, much to the chagrin of those who preferred the helter skelter version of Times Square as an entertainment venue. Most of the time, most architectural places are also a jumble of buildings from different periods and contrasting styles, disproportionate in scale and in a variety of styles tight next to one another and buildings in various states of repair. The same is true of people on the street. The actual scene is of whatever collection of colors is a happenstance and so a jumble.

Compare the color schemes of Impressionism against which the Expressionists were answering. Impressionist painters presented a number of distinct and fresh colors into their paletes and were able to combine different colors on the same painting as well as make some of the paintings monochromatic. But the Impressionists maintained a uniform and well integrated set of colors in any particular painting and so it can be said that part of the Impressionist mode was to maintain a pleasing and integrating point of view on color so that the color scheme of a painting was independent of its subject. It is therefore fair to say that Impressionist color was a conventionalized idea of culture that, in fact, is true in most of the history of painting. Expressionism, for its part, is thought to have applied conventionalism to color in its preferences for dark colors and the use of green and red even on faces. But the Expressionists were a breakthrough in that there was no longer a need to make the colors uniform but, to the contrary, discordant with one another, answering to how reality itself was a jumble of colors that did not match in some sense with one another. That revolution in color is one of the things that might make Expressionism unsettling and even temporary as a movement because it was so wedded to its limited and strange color range. But that is to forget that Rembrandt and Turner were themselves, each on their own, also wedded with their own color schemes which are acceptable because they are their signature tones and so the ways they each saw the world.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, The Red Tower in Halle, 1915, Museum Folkwang

Here is a Kirchner landscape, “The Red Tower in Halle'', that reveals Kirshner’s ways for doing a landscape. The title is itself curious in that the color of the painting as a whole is blue and the tower, not named as a church though it has the steepled shape of one, and is largely black, although the viewer notes, as an afterthought, that the bottom stories of the central structure is not red either but a kind of orange, that color wandering across the painting through the depiction of an orange train atop an orange embankment, which suggests just how large and majestic the structure is. Otherwise, there are shades of blue to color the area surrounding the tower and also white clouds behind. There is what might be a large plaza around the tower, residential or commercial buildings considerably distant from the tower, but there is no hard evidence for the plaza except its existence as an expanse of space  in that there are no indications of the cafes or the statutes that might be present in a plaza that surrounds a significant structure. There are no people depicted though they are presumed to exist in that there is a trolley tram traversing the area. The tower seems like a force field repelling away any other structures around it so as to expand that undescribed space, and so suggests that the mind observes that a space worthy of the tower has to be pushed away so as to allow the tower its stature. Architects make what minds need. 

What is to be made of a landscape divested of its accouterments? “The Red Tower in Halle” can be understood as getting down to essentials by eliminating detail. It just shows blocks of figures, the buildings behind, the spaces around the tower, and the tower itself, experienced as enormous in its setting, towering over the area. That is what is important about the scene: its relative sizes and clearances and the overall blue and darkened hue as if the eye had squinted to see what was really there. That is what it is like to have a feel for a place as opposed to when you see the cafes on the Champs Elysee. Notice how shocking is the contrast to Monet on Rheims, where the details of the stone are reflected differently in different parts of a day’s sunlight. Rather than charmed by the light, the sight is imposing with its gloomy grandeur because of its raw comparative sizes. It is not a stretch to say that Kirshner is onto a phenomenological perspective: to perceive perception as elemental experiences fundamental to the ways of the mind even if people can only with difficulty are able to become aware of what the way their minds work, in this case through blocks father than things and spaces rather than people. This is a new vision not quite lost once seen, while Impressionism, as I have said, remains faithful to its real world surroundings and its details and its color harmony, an artistic addition to the world rather than what an essential mind would garner.

Expressionist painting, even if partly a portrayal of what was fashionable and an artistic movement only temporarily in style, was primarily concerned with consciousness. Even pre-Flapper dress and faces evoked the emotional tones at the core of these people: daring in dress and manner so as to show their independence.  People are like autos in that they have so many styles and colors, each one is perceived by the pedestrian as each to display a type. Each is a kind of personality, as happens when seeing distinct people on the street, each one a type of itself, somehow assembling its own dress and posture and expression. What they are is what counts. That is also true about the structures of consciousness itself. Places seem to bend as shapes are fitted to be placed into the ways the mind will allow them to be organized. Painting therefore illuminates what is invisible and difficult to appreciate by objectifying the ways the mind works.

The conventional and to my mind correct explanation for the depthlessness, the profundity, of German art, literature and thought is that they are all derived from Luther’s perception that religion is found as mediated through consciousness, in that the consciousness is altered by religion rather than that supernatural events intrude in life and people do rituals so as to alter events, which is the case in Catholicism. Kant is the most significant of the German achievements in reducing into secular terms the idea of duty and free will and logical thinking itself as the way consciousness works. Expressionism is a recent version of the attempt to show that to see something is to unfold the way consciousness works, the world perceived from the building blocks of consciousness. That view seems to me, as I say, very deep, even if I think David Hume and G. E. Moore are more accurate in describing the way emotions, social life and ethics work. 

It is a mistake, however, to think that German thought would inevitably descend into Hitler, which is what Erich Fromm thought in his “Escape From Freedom'' because that is to look only at one aspect of the Luther heritage. Expressionists, like Heidigger and his student Sartre, are concerned with the experiences of being rather than how to enter a cul de sac where freedom comes from paradoxically denying it. Rather, the contours of consciousness are inexhaustible in themselves. Were it not for a few mistakes, such as Breuning thinking he could control Hitler, the whole Hitler episode would never have happened and Expressionism could have lingered for much longer and to rival the Abstract Expressionism that claimed American artistic  taste. Remember that Ernest Lubitch, Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder did well in the United States, maintaining their senses of cosmopolitan cynicism, although bereft of their color, while Thomas Mann “colors” and plumage are vibrant and dark in “Joseph and His Brothers”, even if it was written when he was briefly resident in Los Angeles.

Jesus in Old Age

Rather than crucified, buried in the tomb and resurrected and then briefly appearing in the Upper Room where people could marvel at his appearance, though He could have retired because of his ordeals and occasionally performed miracles for people in the local area who seemed particularly appealing to Him when the case presented it to Himself. Otherwise, he thought about what it meant to know himself as somehow divine and mulled on that, trying to appreciate His experience and its meaning. His children and grandchildren would likely, at least when they were young, to  inquire about that matter and He would answer them as best he could. What did it feel like to be dead? Did it feel anything at all, or bad dreams, or the anguish of the Underworld? Did He wake up slowly or all at once when recovering his consciousness? Was awakening  painful or healed except for the scars on His body, which had healed but which He could  show to the children? Maybe, because He knew a lot of things, He could have dictated a memoir or maybe just said new wise remarks never recorded. Then, eventually, He had died of old age and been passed to heaven in the usual way as happens to people of good will who, around the world, also die and are remembered as an idea, for what they really are rather than in their reputations.

That alternative story would have made Jesus more like Mohammed, which is a messenger who experienced resurrection as a gift or a curse rather than engaged in his essential being and so like Moses as well, who had many faults and so not to be taken as a God. Jesus humanized could have still been preeminent and spiritual but not the singularity in which He has been invested, the Gospel writers working hard enough to eliminate as much as possible the apocalyptic reveries as in Revelations and crisp in being in keeping with Jewish law, rationality, and the ecstacy of suffering which is so central to the experience of Christianity, all of which could be retained with making Jesus more human.