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.