Emil Nolde: Master of Color
Emil Nolde was one of the great German Expressionists... one of the most fluid and free-form in composition... and quite possibly the best colorist of them all. He is also an artist whose work I have recently begun to look at more carefully.
Nolde was born Emil Hansen, in the village of Nolde, Denmark, on August 7, 1867. His parents were farmers and devout Protestants. Nolde would bring their heartfelt faith to his numerous paintings of Biblical themes.
Early on the artist recognized that he was unsuitable for farming. He trained as a woodcarver, and worked in furniture factories as a young adult. In 1889, he gained entrance into the School of Applied Arts in Karlsruhe before becoming a drawing-instructor in Switzerland from 1892 to 1898. He left this job to pursue his dream of becoming an independent artist.
From childhood Nolde had loved to paint and draw, but he was already 31 by the time he pursued a career as an artist. When he was rejected by the Munich Academy of Fine Arts in 1898, he spent the next three years taking private painting classes, visiting Paris, and becoming familiar with the contemporary Impressionist and Post-Impressionist scene that was popular at this time.
Nolde married Danish actress Ada Vilstrup in 1902 and moved to Berlin, changing his name to Nolde, after his native village. In Berlin he met the collector Gustav Schiefler and artist Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, both of whom would advocate his work later in life. He spent a brief time between 1906-1907 as a member of the revolutionary expressionist group Die Brücke (The Bridge), of which Schmidt-Rottluff was a member. He later became a member of the Berlin Secession (1908-1910) and exhibited with Wassily Kandinsky and Der Blaue Reiter in 1912. The artist, however, had difficulty maintaining professional relationships with organizations, and he eventually left or was expelled from all of these groups.
Nolde ranks among the finest painters of Biblical themes of the 20th century. Among Nolde's religious paintings, the multi-paneled Life of Christ
This work is not merely Nolde's greatest painting of Biblical subjects, it is also one of the most masterful works of Expressionism... and Modernism as a whole.
The central panel depicts the Crucifixion of Christ...
... and it is clearly based upon the expressionistic Crucifixion by the German Renaissance master, Matthias Grünewald:
Like Grünewald, Nolde employs a tortured distortion of forms and strident colors to convey an emotionally charged scene. Nolde further electrifies the scene through the use of his loose, gestural brush-work.
The central panels is surrounded by other paintings portraying key moments in the narrative of the life of Christ, including The Nativity, The Flight into Egypt, The Resurrection, and Doubting Thomas:
Nolde painted a sizable number of other works on Biblical themes:
-The Mocking of Christ
-Dance Around the Golden Calf
-Adam and Eve
-Jesus in Bethany
-Jesus and the Sinner (Jesus and the Woman Taken in Adultery)
-Jesus and the Children
-Except Ye Become as Children
-Priestesses
-Eve
Nolde painted a limited number of nudes beyond Eve and Adam and Eve. This might be due to something of a misogynistic attitude... or a fear of women or the female body. Where a vast majority of male artists revel in the beauty and sensuality of the nude, Nolde would declare:
"It is strange that Titian, Rubens, and Rembrandt could bear to copy naked female bodies: if one saw them in real life one would be horrified by their ugliness--yet in the paintings they are marvelously beautiful. Art is like that."
Still, Nolde did manage to paint a few other nudes:
Nolde, like a majority of the German Expressionist artists, produced a good many prints... inspired by the German traditions of the graphic arts (Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein, Lucas Cranach, Hans Baldung Grien, Martin Schongauer, etc...). Nolde's woodblock prints were as raw and bold as any by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff:
Nolde could be just as dynamic in his handling of lithography:
His etchings/aquatints are especially fine in the manner in which the artist combined the most tenuous... even trembling line, with the loose... even coarse... areas of washed tones. The resulting prints have an almost weather-beaten appearance:
These prints suggest certain prints by Georges Rouault...
... the more linear works of Paul Klee...
... and even Picasso's late prints:
Nolde explored a great many subjects in his paintings beyond the Biblical:
Portraits and Self-Portraits:
Lovers and Couples:
Dancers, Cabaret, and Nightclubs:
... and especially the Landscape:
Nolde championed the notion that Expressionism, including his work, was a distinctly German art... rooted in the Germanic artistic traditions dating back to the Renaissance and the Middle Ages. Many of his paintings employ troll and ogre and elf-like creatures suggestive of Germanic myths, legends, and folk tales such as those collected by Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm or employed by Richard Wagner in his operas.
Longing for a Renaissance of German culture... rising from the ruins and humiliation of the First World War, Nolde became an early and ardent supporter of the Nazi Party. A number of important members of the Nazi's, notably Joseph Goebbels (Minister of Propaganda) and Fritz Hippler who ran the film department of the Propaganda Ministry, shared Nolde's belief that German Expressionism represented a unique Germanic artistic language... and a rebirth of German Art. Unfortunately, Hitler rejected all forms of Modernism as "Degenerate Art", and Nolde, in spite of his support for the Nazis, was officially condemned.
Not only was Nolde blacklisted and prevented from teaching or exhibiting his work, but he was also banned, under penalty of death, from making any art whatsoever. The Gestapo made periodic searches of his home in order to enforce the party ruling. Under these conditions, Nolde was limited to working in watercolor in order to avoid the tell-tale smells of oil paint. He stored these paintings and all of his art materials under the floorboards beneath the dining room table.
Nolde bitterly referred to these watercolors as his "Unpainted Paintings." Ironically, however, these works are among his finest achievements.
The fluidity of watercolor was perfectly suited to Nolde's loose, Expressionistic manner of working. The artist freely employed splashes and broad washes of brilliant color without concern for contours. Nold'e achievements in watercolor surely rank along-side those of J.M.W. Turner and Winslow Homer. The brilliant glowing color harmonies of these works place him among the most consummate colorists of the 20th century, together with artists such as Matisse, Delaunay, Kandinsky, Bonnard, and Chagall.
Nolde made clear his passion for color, declaring:
"There is silver blue, sky blue and thunder blue. Every colour holds within it a soul, which makes me happy or repels me, and which acts as a stimulus. To a person who has no art in him, colours are colours, tones tones...and that is all. All their consequences for the human spirit, which range between heaven to hell, just go unnoticed."
After WWII, Nolde was once again honoured, receiving the German Order of Merit, West Germany's highest civilian decoration. Nolde died April 13, 1956.
Unfortunately, German Expressionism as a whole was repudiated and ostracized for a number of decades as being "too German" in light of the institutionalized racism of the Third Reich. American Abstract Expressionism and later Pop Art became the International Art Style.
With the development of Neo-Expressionism and the rise to fame of such German artists as Jörg Immendorf, Helmut Middendorf, Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz, etc... there was a renewed interest in German Expressionism... including the work of Emil Nolde. A major Retrospective of Nolde's work just recently closed at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main. Other major exhibitions have taken place in Berlin, Baden-Baden, Vienna, and New York.