August Macke’s “Woman with Umbrella”: A Philosophical Reflection on Art, Memory, and Social Media

The painting above belongs to August Macke and is also one of his favorite works. Entitled “Woman with Umbrella in Front of a Hat Shop”, this charming work immediately catches the eye with its vibrant colors and elegant details. So much so that even a tiny reproduction of it can be recognized among many other works easily. It has an almost magical aura. The woman in the painting looks like she is going for a walk, and by elegantly holding her umbrella in the air, she immortalises any moment we might encounter in everyday life. Any moment, but a moment that has somehow been immortalized, and ironically, I don’t even know if this moment really happened or not. For me, it corresponds to an almost metaphysical moment in which it is meaningless whether it is lived or not, since it repeats itself every second as a work of art that has now passed into history. This moment is constantly being loaded with new meanings for me, but I will come to that in a moment.

While the woman in the picture draws attention to herself with her elegance and self-confidence, the hat shop in the background seems to take the viewer on a nostalgic journey. But what I see in the woman is not her elegance, too.

My eyes have encountered this exquisite artefact almost every day for years. I looked at it every single day in the beautiful place where it hung in my room. I even looked at this picture more than the wall clock, and strangely enough, it made me feel that time had passed, that I was still alive and that “it was my lifetime”. Every time I came across it, I would escape the routine of everyday life, and it would, as we had decided, captivate me with its fabulous ambiance. Sometimes I would be lost in contemplation for minutes at a time, and other times I would merely glance at her and pass by. Until a few years ago, when some certain disappointing personal experiences drastically altered my viewpoint, I never got weary of staring at her.

At first look, August Macke’s style doesn’t appear all that unique, but you have to get used to his works for a time to feel deeply his artistic creativity and exceptional imagination. To understand the painter, you have to feel deeply the world he created, and it is as if there is some kind of threshold you have to cross. At least that was my experience… Macke was therefore expecting a special effort and spiritual subtlety from you to interact with his world. I can’t even imagine how he has reached such a point, integrating intuitive sensitivity with a high level of creativity. All I know is he worked hard, thought deeply, I guess, and created a lot of work while he was establishing his unique style, just like other artists of his era.

There are clear differences between the painter’s early themes and technique and the works of his maturity, such as a keen attention to urban life and the alienation it engenders, as well as the sharpness and vividness of color and line. In analyzing these differences, it is also interesting to follow the evolution of Macke’s understanding of the times and the evolution of his art. It is possible to see similar differences in the painters after comes of the Die Brücke period, other Expressionists, and the Spanish painter Salvador Dalí, who would arrive at the station of Surrealism as a result of his enormous search. These artists also experimented in their own ways with different themes and techniques, influenced in many ways by the social and cultural dynamics of the time in which they lived. In painters such as Gabriele Münter and Conrad Felixmüller, we can clearly see the stylistic changes they developed during their lifetimes, changes that were shaped over time in interaction with different movements in the art world and contributed significantly to their artistic identities. In this way, each of them became a value that found its own voice, an aesthetic peak that created its own rules, or even a “school” in its own right, if we do not exaggerate.

The reason I chose this painting to write a review about is because of the penetrating, multi-layered effect it has on me. This effect is essentially two-dimensional. First of all, since my childhood, I have always loved colors and the striking and profound impressions that the use of color creates in people. I have always thought about how colors can affect people’s emotions and reflect different moods. This effect is partly unconscious and does not need to be explained. Over time, I realized that these feelings actually form a complex structure that often needs to be looked at and reflected upon. Then came the critical tendencies, which took on a more ideological and cultural dimension. These tendencies are closely linked to the ideas generated by the radical theoretical texts we read in our youth and are shaped by the themes of alienation, power, consumption, and the society of display by writers such as Guy Debord, Herbert Marcuse, Michel Foucault, and others. These ideas have had a significant influence on my analyses of how social dynamics and the place of the individual within society are shaped. I can say that the projection of this critical content is intensified for me by the feeling of “surveillance”, like a ghost watching the world through a window, like a warning that better explains how fragile and thin the building blocks of society are while witnessing the course of events.

But what I said above is still valid; what draws my attention to this painting is no longer its formal characteristics, its technique, its period, its relation to consumer culture, etc. These are themes that have been discussed frequently and are known by everyone, even if superficially, I think. Today, when I look at this picture, I remember someone else, Hannah Arendt, and what she called the “Banality of Evil”: insensitivity. There is something that is not subject to those circles formed by legal and valid social norms between doing something and not doing something, which are becoming increasingly vague, flexible and invisible: conscience! Yes, this picture tells me about conscience now. How long is it possible or acceptable to remain a spectator, to objectify, to watch without reacting, and how long can a real person tolerate a thing such as this… Images interact with people according to their own experience. This is the non-dogmatic, creative essence of symbolic expression. This painting, which may be telling you something completely different now, has been telling me this truth for some time. Actually, this expression would be an understatement; it is not telling, it is shouting!

In the last century, the great film director Krzysztof Kieslowski, in one of his documentaries, turns the camera on himself and says, in summary, “In fact, in all my films I tell a little bit about myself. You can only tell a meaningful story by going through it yourself.” I believe there is no other phrase that expresses the depth of cinema, art, painting and storytelling so clearly. In fact, the work created by any artist is a reflection and reconciliation of the inner world of both him and the audience he shares. It not only offers the viewer a visual feast but also transmits the emotional and intellectual accumulations of common human experience, values and conscience. Unfortunately, today there is another phenomenon. Talking about yourself by pointing the camera at someone else. That is what this picture has reminded me of for a long time. At least this is one of its dozens of connotations and the one that screams at me. Because today there is a phenomenon called social media where showing and being visible is cheapened, distorted, deformed and ugly. Unfortunately, instead of sharing their feelings and thoughts, people on social media platforms are now more interested in watching others, “pawning” at their lives as objects of analysis, and “consuming” them as objects. There is a fundamental emptiness created by this interest: a simple, superficial connection, far removed from real interaction, where projections and fantasies magnify hatred. Pink Floyd has a song called Welcome to the Machine. Today, I marvel at how naive it is, because we have destroyed the world left by our fathers and left its ashes to our children. Today, we live in an age of social media where naivety is no longer the norm and “roughness” has become the norm, and there is a special type of behaviour here. We stare at people for a long time as if they were a creature in a cage, an ornamental fish or a lion in a cage. Without any interaction. We actually consume the human being. We turn him/her into an object of spectacle and then make up hundreds, thousands, millions of stories about him/her. In this process, we ignore the true identity, depth and value of the human being. We are wasting it, spending it… Moreover, we are only content with what is visible, and we are losing that beautiful depth of introspection required by art, literature and intellectual refinement. August Macke’s woman in a hat is so innocent compared to us.

A human being is not and should not be a hat, a coat or a pair of shoes. Our gaze should not make a person ugly. It should make him/her beautiful, worthy of compassion, and unique and deepen the beauty by adding our own values to his/her values. But we know, sadly we know, that our gaze can make people ugly. The empathy we feel for ourselves and others gradually diminishes, and we ruthlessly make both ourselves and the other person nothing. And we do it without thinking. However, I think the woman with the umbrella in the picture is the one who is disfigured by the gaze. In fact, do you realize that she has no face? It has now become part of the simplicity objectified by the relationship of change to which it belongs; it has left the sphere of meaning; it seems to have disappeared philosophically. It has become an emptiness that alienates people from each other, weakens social bonds, and is beyond ugly. Today, it takes great effort and energy not to be one of the people disfigured by the gaze. Of course, I am talking about an intense energy, shaped by intellectual knowledge and moral courage, active and prudent enough to risk loneliness if necessary. This is the most difficult but also the most valuable aspect of being human. Indeed, Macke‘s work speaks to all of us today, as if to say, “You are human beings, brothers and sisters. We call you human beings; you have at least as much honor as an umbrella!”

This is more than an artistic expression; it is a reminder of the importance and value of human beings. May we find ourselves through art, see others and live in peace with our emotions.