Emil Nolde
Expressionism’s colourful lone wolf.
Emil Nolde painted flowers, the sea and religious scenes in glowing colours. He was a Nazi, yet the regime still branded him “degenerate”.
Emil Nolde was born Emil Hansen in 1867 in the village of Nolde in Schleswig, near the border between Germany and Denmark. He grew up on a farm and first trained as a woodcarver and furniture designer. For some years he taught drawing in St Gallen in Switzerland. He made money from postcards in which mountain peaks were given human faces, and the proceeds allowed him to devote himself to painting. He took the name Nolde after his home village in 1902.
He studied in Munich and Paris and in 1906–1907 was briefly a member of the Expressionist group Die Brücke. He went his own way, however. In the years around 1909–1912 he painted a series of religious pictures, including Pentecost and the large cycle The Life of Christ. The figures are crude, the faces mask-like and the colours glow.
Nolde also painted the sea, flowers and gardens. He was a master of watercolour, letting the colours bleed into the damp paper. In 1913–1914 he took part in an expedition to New Guinea. With his Danish wife, the actress Ada Vilstrup, he built the house and garden at Seebüll from 1927, where he lived for the rest of his life.
Nolde was a member of the Nazi Party and held antisemitic views. Even so, the regime rejected his art. More than a thousand of his works were removed from German museums, and he was one of the most prominently targeted artists in the “Degenerate Art” exhibition of 1937. In 1941 he was banned from selling and exhibiting. During these years he painted small watercolours that he called “unpainted pictures”.
After the war he was long presented solely as a victim of Nazism. Research and a major exhibition in Berlin in 2019 have brought his Nazi sympathies more clearly to light. He died in 1956 at Seebüll, which is now a museum. He is regarded as one of the great colourists of German Expressionism, but his legacy is contested.