One of the arguments used by cultural relativists is that it is impossible to divorce art from its context. What, for example, would a Trobriand Islander make of Don Giovanni or an Amazonian Indian of a portrait by Velázquez? If, as seems likely, they would make little of them, then the pretensions of art to human universality are bogus. And if art is not humanly universal, then context is all—and if context is all, then no art is good or bad but thinking makes it so. Thus one human artifact is as good as another, and one field of endeavor as important as another. Needless to say, if this argument is taken seriously, it does not exactly encourage the development of hard-won skills by would-be artists. Why learn to draw or paint when throwing mud randomly at a wall will produce something as good, or perhaps I should say “valid”?
Be all this as it may, it is undoubtedly the case that some artists are more difficult to divorce from their context than others. Whether this means that there are truly context-free artists is another question, for not all lines on graphs begin at zero. Yet, for all practical purposes, no one could approach the art of Felix Nussbaum (1904–44) in an unhistorical way.
Nussbaum was born into an assimilated bourgeois Jewish family in Osnabrück; his father, like many German Jews, served in the Imperial German army during the First World War. Although he was personally free