Saturday, November 14, 2026
Self-Portrait with Hat (1919)
There is something about Karl Schmidt-Rottluff's Self-Portrait with Hat that makes me reflect on my own midlife. Beneath a broad-brimmed hat, the artist's face emerges through sharp angles and unexpected colors. One eye appears alert, while the other is nearly closed. The portrait is unmistakably human, yet it seems less concerned with physical resemblance than with communicating something about the person beneath the hat. A self-portrait is not simply an image of what we look like. It is an expression of how we understand ourselves. Looking at this painting, I realize that I cannot imagine seeing myself without a hat.
I have developed something of a midlife obsession with hats. I hesitate to call it a crisis, although the number I own might suggest otherwise. There are hundreds of them, representing colleges, professional sports teams, historical places, and events. Each has some association with an interest, an experience, or a place I have visited. What began as a practical approach to collecting souvenirs has gradually become something more personal. My hats have become a way of telling my story.
As I have traveled, particularly with my brother, I have struggled to decide what kinds of artifacts I want to bring home. I collect magnets, purchase occasional works of art, take photographs, and write about my experiences. Each preserves something of the places I have visited, but most eventually becomes stationary. Magnets find their way onto a surface, artwork hangs on a wall, and photographs become part of an expanding digital archive. They preserve experiences, but they remain largely separate from everyday life.
Hats are different. They travel with me. A hat purchased in one city can accompany me to another. Something that began as a souvenir becomes part of my daily appearance. Rather than merely preserving an experience, I incorporate it into the way I present myself to the world.
There is also a practical dimension. As a larger man whose weight has fluctuated considerably over the years, buying clothing has not always been easy. Shirts purchased during one period of my life may become unsuitable during another. Some spend years hanging in a closet before eventually being donated. Clothing can become an uncomfortable reminder that our bodies are constantly changing. Hats, however, offer a certain continuity. They are adjustable, colorful, and relatively independent of changes in my body. Whatever else may change about my appearance, I can still reach for a familiar hat.
I have even developed rules governing their use. I generally avoid wearing a hat that matches the color of my shirt. I am also careful about combining college or professional sports affiliations. A college shirt and a professional sports hat might work together, but wearing competing institutions or teams from the same level is another matter. These conventions are admittedly arbitrary, but they reveal the attention I give to what might otherwise seem an insignificant decision. I am not simply reaching for something to cover my head. I am composing an appearance, even if my artistic medium happens to be an excessive collection of baseball caps.
What I have come to appreciate most, however, is how often these symbols create opportunities for conversation. Kansas, Arkansas, Michigan, the Royals, and the Chiefs inspire strong feelings among people who claim them as their own. My relationship with these institutions and teams may be different. Sometimes my attachment comes from a visit, a game, or an experience shared with my brother rather than a lifetime of loyalty. Yet the distinction rarely prevents a conversation. Someone recognizes a logo, asks a question, or offers a memory of their own.
A Michigan hat might remind me of visiting Ann Arbor, while someone else associates it with years spent attending the university. A Royals hat might recall an afternoon at the ballpark, while another person remembers watching games with a parent or grandparent. We may not share the same history or enthusiasm, but we recognize something meaningful in a common symbol. The hat reminds me of somewhere I have been, while it reminds someone else of something important in their own life. For a moment, our experiences intersect.
The sociological tradition of symbolic interactionism offers a useful way of understanding these encounters. George Herbert Mead recognized that our understanding of ourselves develops through social interaction. The meanings we assign to objects and symbols are not entirely private; they emerge and change through our relationships with others. A hat may carry one meaning for the person wearing it and another for the person recognizing it. The conversation between them can create something neither anticipated. What began as a connection to a place becomes a connection to another person.
This brings me back to Schmidt-Rottluff's painting.
Created in 1919, following his military service during World War I, the portrait belongs to a period of personal and historical upheaval. As a German Expressionist and founding member of Die Brücke, Schmidt-Rottluff approached painting as an opportunity to communicate subjective experience rather than reproduce external appearances. His face is constructed from exaggerated planes of green, yellow, orange, and black against a deep blue background. The angular features and asymmetrical eyes produce a figure that seems simultaneously guarded and exposed.
The hat is an ordinary object within an extraordinary representation of the self. Its recognizable form contrasts with the distorted face beneath it. We cannot know precisely what significance the hat held for the artist, but its inclusion was a choice. Schmidt-Rottluff could have represented himself without it. Instead, he incorporated it into an image through which he presented his understanding of himself.
This is what makes the painting particularly meaningful to me. A self-portrait is never an entirely neutral record. Even the most realistic portrait involves decisions about clothing, expression, composition, and what should remain outside the frame. The artist determines which aspects of the self to emphasize. Yet once the work is completed, its meaning is no longer entirely under the artist's control. Viewers approach the image through their own experiences and associations. The person who creates the image and the person who encounters it participate in different acts of interpretation.
The same is true of the identities we construct in everyday life. I select a hat because of what it represents to me, but someone else may interpret that symbol through an entirely different history. What I understand as a travel souvenir may be interpreted as a declaration of lifelong loyalty. What I intend as an expression of personal memory may become an invitation to share someone else's. The self we present is never entirely the self that others perceive, but the space between those understandings creates opportunities for connection.
I suspect that midlife involves a heightened awareness of this process. In our younger years, identity often seems like something we are working toward. We acquire an education, establish careers, develop relationships, and imagine the people we might become. By middle age, much of that imagined future has become lived experience. Some ambitions have been realized, others revised or abandoned. Relationships have changed, our bodies have changed, and the world in which we first understood ourselves has changed along with us.
Philosopher Paul Ricoeur's concept of narrative identity provides a useful framework for understanding this experience. Identity is not simply a collection of permanent characteristics. It emerges through the stories by which we organize our experiences into a recognizable sense of self. These narratives provide continuity without requiring that we remain unchanged. We are simultaneously the people we have been and the people we are still becoming.
My hats, in their modest way, participate in that narrative. Collectively, they form a personal archive of places, interests, relationships, and experiences. Individually, they allow me to select which part of that history I want to carry into a particular day. Unlike a photograph or a journal entry, however, they allow those accumulated experiences to remain active in the present, where they can acquire new associations and meanings.
Perhaps this is why I find the conventional idea of a midlife crisis somewhat inadequate. The familiar stereotype suggests a person attempting to recover youth through conspicuous consumption or dramatic reinvention. Yet the psychological work of midlife may involve something quite different: integrating experiences, reconsidering what matters, and discovering new ways to express a self that has become more complicated with time.
My collection may be excessive, but I do not think it represents an attempt to become someone else. If anything, it reflects an increasing willingness to acknowledge the many interests and experiences that constitute who I already am. No single hat tells the complete story, just as no single institution, place, or allegiance adequately represents the whole person.
Schmidt-Rottluff's self-portrait offers a visual expression of this complexity. His exaggerated forms and conflicting colors refuse to reduce the human face to something familiar and easily understood. The painting is an interpretation of the self rather than a definitive statement about it. Its power comes not from resolving the contradictions of personal identity but from allowing them to remain visible.
Perhaps my hats offer a much less dramatic version of the same idea. Each reveals something, but each also leaves something out. Together, they reflect a life that continues to accumulate experiences, associations, and relationships. They remind me that identity is not something we finish constructing at a particular age. It is continually revised through the lives we lead and the people we encounter.
Every morning, I reach for a hat. I consider its color, what I am wearing, where I am going, and sometimes the memories attached to it. It is an ordinary ritual, hardly deserving of philosophical scrutiny. Yet looking at Schmidt-Rottluff's painting makes me recognize that these small decisions are not entirely superficial. They are part of the way I see myself and the way I invite others to see me.
Somewhere along the way, the things I collected became part of the person doing the collecting. And as long as there are new places to visit, new people to meet, and new experiences to incorporate into my story, I suspect there will always be room for another hat.
Wednesday, November 11, 2026
Tuesday, November 10, 2026
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