Emil Nolde

Like the movement Die Brücke with which he was associated, Emil Nolde's art forms a bridge from Germany's distant visual past to its more radical future. 

Raised in the Protestant faith and grounded in biblical readings, Nolde turned away from these Romantic depictions and drew visual inspiration directly from biblical texts. His restoration of specific Christian imagery in a new, colorful style became a hallmark of his work, significantly contributing to both Expressionism and the northern visual arts tradition.

Biography of Emil Nolde

Emil Hansen was born in Nolde, Denmark, in 1867 to Protestant peasant farmers. As a child, he felt little connection with his three brothers, who adapted well to farm life. His introduction to the arts began in 1884 with a four-year apprenticeship as a woodcarver and furniture designer. In his early adult years, he worked in furniture factories and traveled through Germany, visiting cities like Munich and Berlin.

From 1889 to 1890, the artist continued his studies at the Karlsruhe School of Applied Arts. He then taught industrial design and ornamental drawing at St. Gallen in Switzerland from 1892 to 1897. During this period, he created his first commercially successful work: postcards depicting the Swiss Alps as grotesque characters. These postcards sold widely, providing him with financial support and enabling him to leave his teaching post. In 1898, he pursued further education with painter Friedrich Fehr and later studied under painter Adolf Hölzel at the Neu Dachau School in Munich.

In 1899, the artist traveled to Paris to study at the Académie Julian. He continued his travels until 1901 when he met Ada Vilstrup. They married in 1902, and he adopted the name Nolde, after his hometown.

Emil Nolde's fine art flourished in the early 1900s after he joined several avant-garde groups. The first was Die Brücke in Dresden, founded in 1905. The artist joined in 1906 and soon began teaching the group his experimental approach to etchings, focusing on highlighting the medium's unique characteristics rather than creating prints that mimicked drawings. This approach is evident in the prints he produced during this time. He was also encouraged to create woodcuts, a medium historically associated with German art.

Although Nolde left Die Brücke in 1907 after only a year, its influence is evident in his subsequent work. After recovering from a serious illness caused by drinking poisoned water in 1909, his subject matter shifted noticeably towards religious iconography. Dance, a revered form of raw expression for Die Brücke artists, also influenced Nolde. 

After parting ways with the Die Brücke artists, Nolde became a member of the Berlin Secession, a group of artists who favored Post-Impressionism over the traditional aesthetics promoted by the state-run Association of Berlin Artists. He was part of the Berlin Secession from 1908 until 1910, when he and other Expressionists were excluded from exhibiting with the group, leading to a bitter conflict with its leader, Max Liebermann.

In 1911, Nolde joined Wassily Kandinsky's and Franz Marc's Der Blaue Reiter group. In 1913, he was invited to participate in a German expedition to the South Pacific to study racial characteristics in German New Guinea, though the reasons for this invitation are unclear. This trip deepened his interest in Paul Gauguin's work and Primitivism, a style he continued to incorporate into his paintings from that period into the 1930s.

In 1927, the artist moved to Seebüll, near the Danish border in Northern Germany, where he designed a house surrounded by self-made ceramics, textiles, and a garden. He and his wife lived there for the rest of their lives. Today, the house is the Nolde Museum, dedicated to the exhibition, research, and scholarship of Nolde's life and works.

Emil Nolde's early interest in themes traditionally Teutonic, his mid-career conflict with Max Liebermann, and his studies of racial characteristics made it unsurprising that he expressed sympathies towards the Nazi party as early as the 1920s. Research indicates his active involvement with the Nazis as a member of the National Socialist German Workers Party. The artist argued that Expressionism was a purely Germanic form of self-expression, a view shared by some in the Nazi party. However, Nazi policy towards art was strict, categorizing almost all modern art as degenerate. Nolde's art was included in the infamous Degenerate Art exhibition in 1937.

Recent research by historian Bernhard Fulda and the Nolde Museum reveals that Nolde, with the cooperation of exhibition organizers, publishers, journalists, art historians, and art dealers, largely succeeded in keeping his Nazi past out of the public eye and separating it from his artistic work. Evidence suggests he remained sympathetic to the party until the end of WWII.

Despite his ties, Nolde was ordered by the Nazis in 1941 to stop buying canvas and paint. Defying this order, he continued to paint using watercolors, a more discreet and portable medium. Inspired by Vincent van Gogh, Nolde's watercolors predominantly featured flowers and landscapes, which comprised the majority of his late work until his death in 1956.

The Art of Emil Nolde

Emil Nolde reintroduced religious subject matter, a staple of northern art for centuries. His interpretation retained the German preference for expressive images but moved away from realism. Although based on biblical incidents from both the Old and New Testaments, his compositions abstracted and exaggerated forms to depict figures in a compressed space, bypassing traditional linear perspective.

In addition to rethinking these basic elements of art, Nolde used color boldly and symbolically, a novel approach in northern painting. He carried these ideas into his watercolor paintings, infusing them with a vitality previously not associated with the medium.

Nolde's expertise as a wood-cutter allowed him to apply the principles of expressionism and abstraction, characterized by strong contrasts, to printmaking as well as painting, distinguishing him in both genres.

Emil Nolde’s Legacy: Solitary Artist and Influential Printmaker

Emil Nolde's brief association with Die Brücke, his contentious relationship with the Berlin Secession, and his long periods of isolation and travel contribute to his image as a somewhat solitary figure in the art world of his time. Nonetheless, his influence was significant throughout his long career.

Nolde's dedication to printmaking revitalized a declining medium, benefiting artists such as Otto Mueller, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Max Eckstein. His efforts in re-popularizing printmaking as both an art form and a means of disseminating images and ideas (as seen in the catalogs and pamphlets of Die Brücke) paved the way for the use of prints and art as propaganda during World War II.

Ironically, despite his affiliation with the Nazi party, Nolde became the artist most targeted by them, with over 1,000 of his works confiscated across Germany. His flower paintings, collectively known as his Unpainted Pictures, are viewed as a symbol of resistance against the Nazi regime's policies toward modernism.

The Nolde Museum, situated in his Seebüll home and studio, continues to showcase his works alongside those of his friends and fellow Expressionists.