Karlsruhe School of Applied Arts
Académie Julian
Emil Nolde (née Hansen) was born in Nolde, Denmark in 1867, to Protestant peasant farmers Niels Hansen and his wife Hanna Christine. As a child he felt that he had little in common with his three brothers, who took well to farm life. His first exposure to the arts came through a four-year apprenticeship as a woodcarver and furniture designer starting in 1884.
Nolde's studies were at the Karlsruhe School of Applied Arts from 1889 to 1890. In 1898, Nolde was turned down by the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. His rejection motivated him to hone his skills as an artist; he took painting and drawing classes for the next three years. He also traveled to Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian.
Emil Nolde spent his early years as a young adult working in furniture factories and traveling through Germany, visiting cities like Munich and Berlin. He took a position at St. Gallen in Switzerland, teaching industrial design and ornamental drawing from 1892 to 1897. It was during this time that he created his first commercially successful body of work, postcards depicting the Swiss Alps as grotesque characters. They sold widely and offered Nolde financial support for several years, spurring him to leave his teaching post to pursue additional schooling in 1898 with painter Friedrich Fehr, and subsequently under painter Adolf Hölzel at the Neu Dachau School in Munich. The following year, he traveled to Paris. He continued to travel until 1901.
Nolde's fine art only flourished in the early 1900s, after his association with several avant-garde groups. The first of these was the Die Brücke group in Dresden, founded by four former architecture students in 1905. Nolde joined the group in 1906, and soon began to teach the group how to make etchings with his experimental approach to the medium; his intention was to highlight its specific characteristics rather than create a print with the likeness in tonality and lines of a drawing that could be precisely reproduced. This focus was aptly demonstrated in the prints he produced during this time. He, in turn, was encouraged to use his skills to make woodcuts, an art form that in the past was particularly associated with the art of Germany.
Although Nolde left the Die Brücke group in 1907 after just one year, its influence permeated his work during the next several years. After recovering from a serious illness caused by drinking poisoned water in 1909, there was a noticeable shift in subject matter towards religious iconography. Additionally, dance was a revered form of raw expression to Die Brücke artists. Art historian Starr Figura writes that for Nolde, this manifested in paintings of "unbridled dancers in primeval settings that were inspired by the wild movements…as well as his related fascination with exotic cultures."
After leaving the Die Brücke artists, Nolde became a member of the Berlin Secession, a group started by artists who rejected the traditional aesthetics of the state-run Association of Berlin Artists in favor of Post-Impressionism. He worked with them from 1908 through 1910, until he and other Expressionists were excluded from exhibiting with the Secession. He bitterly fought with Berlin Secession leader, Max Liebermann. Subsequently, he joined Wassily Kandinsky's and Franz Marc's Der Blaue Reiter group in 1911. For reasons that are obscure, Nolde was invited to join a German expedition to the South Pacific in 1913 to study racial characteristics in German New Guinea. That trip solidified his interest in the work of Paul Gauguin and Primitivism, a style he continued to incorporate in his own painting from this time into the 1930s.
Nolde moved to Seebüll, near the Danish border in Northern Germany in 1927. He designed a house (surrounded by self-made ceramics and textiles, and garden) that he and his wife would live in for the remainder of his life. It now houses the Nolde Museum, endowed by the artist and committed to exhibition, research, and scholarship of Nolde's life and works.
Given Nolde's early interest in working with themes that were traditionally Teutonic, his mid-career altercation with Max Liebermann, and his studying of racial characteristics, it is not surprising that the artist expressed sympathies towards the Nazi party as early as the 1920s. There is research that points to his active involvement with the Nazis as he was a member of the National Socialist German Workers Party.
He also argued that Expressionism was a purely Germanic form of self-expression, to the agreement of some others in the Nazi party. However, the Nazi policy towards art was firm; almost all modern art was considered degenerate. Nolde's art was a prime example and was included in the infamous Degenerate Art exhibition in 1937. Yet according to recent research by historian Bernhard Fulda and the Nolde museum, the artist "in cooperation with exhibition organizers, publishers, journalists, art historians and art dealers, Nolde largely succeeded in keeping his Nazi past out of the public view, and separating it completely from his artistic work." Evidence points to him being sympathetic to the party all the way until the end of World War II.
Despite his ties, he was served with an order by the Nazis that prohibited him from continuing to buy canvas and paint in 1941. He refused to comply and continued to paint using watercolor, a subtler, more portable medium that was often used for studies instead of oil paint whose scent could be easily detected by neighbors or soldiers. Inspired by Vincent van Gogh, Nolde's watercolors would be predominantly of flowers and landscapes, which would comprise the majority of his late work until his death in 1956.
Despite being a member of the Nazi party, Nolde is ironically known as the artist most confiscated by them, with over 1000 works taken from across Germany. His flower paintings, now known collectively as his Unpainted Pictures, are seen as a symbol of resistance against the party and its policies towards modernism.
Sunflowers
The missionary
Papuan youth
Flower garden (marigolds)
Gustav Schiefler
Prophet
Indonesian couple
Bonnichsen family
Portrait of South Sea Islander
Child and Large Bird
Young Couple
Wildly Dancing Children
Crucifixion
Irises and poppies
At the Café
Legend- Saint Mary of Egypt - Death in the Desert
Autumn Sea VII
Women and Pierrot
Stormy sea
Mask Still Life III
Burial
Maruchbrucke
Sunflowers
Flower Garden
Self-portrait
Colored sky above the Marais
Pentecast
Sunset
Candle Dancers
The enthusiast
Sunrise at the sea
Jesus Christ and the sinner
Figure with flowers
Excited People
Dance Around the Golden Calf
The Last Supper
Portrait of South Sea Islander
Kneeling negro girl
Dancing Couple
Head of spanish woman
Portrait of South Sea Islander
Holy Family
Mocking of Christ
The tribute money
Large Poppies
Emil was fervently religious and racked by a sense of sin.
There is research that points to his active involvement with the Nazis as he was a member of the National Socialist German Workers Party.
An early member of the Nazi Party, Nolde displayed the exaggerated nationalism, xenophobia and anti-semitism which was widespread in German border regions such as his homeland in Schleswig-Holstein. He had been repelled by his earlier stays in France and Italy, denouncing the ‘sweetness’ of the impressionists who could not touch his ‘tougher Nordic senses’. He was no less scathing about cubism and constructivism, opposing on principle all forms of aesthetic as well as genetic miscegenation.
Nolde’s early writings were also full of vituperative statements about Jews to whom he denied ‘soul and creative spirit' and whom he accused of introducing materialistic greed into the art world. He attacked the ‘Jewish intellectual spirit’ of Herwarth Walden (Director of the avant-garde Sturm gallery in Berlin and a pioneer of abstract art) and the art dealer Paul Cassirer for exhibiting only French artists and their German imitators. According to Nolde, Jews were incapable of understanding an art rooted in German soil. When the Nazis came to power, Nolde praised the uprising against Jewish power, dominant in all the arts’ and expected to be exalted as the most German of all artists. He also argued that Expressionism was a purely Germanic form of self-expression.
Quotations:
"The artist need not know very much, best of all let him work instinctively and paint as naturally as he breathes or walks."
"Clever people master life; the wise illuminate it and create fresh difficulties."
"There is silver blue, sky blue and thunder blue. Every color 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, colors are colors, tones. .. and that is all. All their consequences for the human spirit, which range between heaven to hell, just go unnoticed."
"Art is exalted above religion and race. Not a single solitary soul these days believes in the religions of the Assyrians, the Egyptians and the Greeks. Only their art, whenever it was beautiful, stands proud and exalted, rising above all time."
"Yellow can express happiness, and then again, pain. There is flame red, blood red, and rose red; there is silver blue, sky blue, and thunder blue; every color harbors its own soul, delighting or disgusting or stimulating me."
"Sometimes it seems to me that I am capable of absolutely nothing, but that nature through me can accomplish a great deal."
"What an artist learns matters little. What he himself discovers has a real worth for him, and gives him the necessary incitement to work."
"A work becomes a work of art when one re-evaluates the values of nature and adds one's own spirituality."
Nolde's fine art only flourished in the early 1900s, after his association with several avant-garde groups. The first of these was the Die Brücke group in Dresden. After leaving the Die Brücke artists, Nolde became a member of the Berlin Secession, a group started by artists who rejected the traditional aesthetics of the state-run Association of Berlin Artists in favor of Post-Impressionism. He also joined Wassily Kandinsky's and Franz Marc's Der Blaue Reiter group in 1911.
Emil Nolde traveled until 1901, when he met Ada Vilstrup; they married in 1902, and he changed his name to Nolde, after his hometown. On November 2, 1946, Ada Nolde died. On February 22, 1948, Nolde remarried; to 26 year-old Jolanthe Erdmann, daughter of composer and pianist Eduard Erdmann.
