This is a painting of a man with a lazy eye, painted by a man who had survived a serious stroke.

But this is only the tip of the awesome iceberg that is the Portrait of Dr. Karl Schwarz.

See, Lovis Corinth is a German from the early 20th century. If you know anything about history then you know that this makes him one of the most German German’s to have ever lived in Germany. Patriotism and nationalism were rampant at the time. This hadn’t evolved to the levels that we would see after World War I (Hitler was still in art school), so he wouldn’t necessarily be classified as a Nazi, but he was definitely a proto-Nazi.

Five years before the creation of this painting, Corinth suffered a massive stroke that permanently forced him to alter his art style. Luckily for him, this change to Expressionism really helped him take off, and so that stroke is essentially why we are talking about him today. This is interesting because it runs opposed to the popular German narrative of “might makes right” that the Nazi’s hijacked from Nietzsche. Here, he is succeeding because of a weakness, not due to his strength. There is evidence that Corinth would have subscribed to the popular German perspectives of the time as he was well connected to the German elite who circulated these ideas. Additionally, we can see that he might have been developing a Nazi-esque antisemitism by comparing his Blinded Samson to the popular racist depiction of Jewish people, i.e. images of scruffy sub-humans with long noses, images that would be made famous by cartoons of Philipp Ruprecht. We can see that they are, unfortunately, very similar.

Corinth went out of his way in this image to highlight Dr. Schwarz physical weakness. We have to remember that as the artist, he has absolute control over his work and could have chosen to hide the deformities of his models, like Anthony van Dyck did with Queen Henrietta Maria of England.

Ironically, roughly ten years after Corinth died, the Nazi party declared his work "degenerate."