KUNGSHOLMEN (PART ONE)

Kungsholmen, Stockholm.

DJURGÅRDEN (PART EIGHT)

Djurgården, Stockholm.

NEVER BEING BORING

Cecil Beaton with Anita Loos in California, December 1929.

To listen to Beaton describe in strictly visual terms a person or room or landscape is to hear a recitation that can be hilarious or brutal or very beautiful, but will always certainly be brilliant.

A person sitting for Beaton has a sense of slightly drifting in space – of not being photographed but painted, and painted by a casual, barely visible presence. But Beaton is there, oh yes. For all his quiet tread he is one of the most on-the-spot people alive: his visual intelligence is genius.

– Truman Capote, “Cecil Beaton” (1969)

Since he wasn’t born into aristocracy, money and stolen wealth, it might be argued that Sir Cecil Beaton’s life began with a proper false start. He was in fact conceived at the superior Hôtel Hermitage in Monte Carlo, and he did have a very happy childhood at home, but to his great disappointment he was not a hereditary toff. As the versatile artist told John Freeman when he was the subject of the BBC interview series Face to Face on February 18, 1962: “No one could help me. It was up to me to find the sort of world that I wanted.”

In the MoMA publication Cecil Beaton: The New York Years Donald Albrecht writes that, “Among other forces, like his originality and homosexuality, Beaton’s fringe position instilled in him a snobbish obsession with class and status – and a determination to be perceived as an artist, rather than a member of the merchant class of his father. Like [Evelyn] Waugh, it also made him an astute observer of speech, clothing, gesture, and pose as signifiers of status.”

Cecil Beaton (1904–1980) was a constitutional dandy and a socialite with an infallible sense for the visual world and the truly marvellous. Alan Jay Lerner – who worked with Beaton on both the stage and screen version of the transitional My Fair Lady – noticed that, “Inside Cecil Beaton there was another Cecil Beaton sending out lots of little Cecils into the world.” He flourished of course as a portrait and fashion photographer, he was an illustrator, columnist, dress designer, art director, author, a decorator and set designer, sometimes an actor, who ironically only failed where he most wanted to succeed, as a playwright. The theatre was the love of his life.

Beaton maintained that his adult vision was guided by his “inward child’s eye”. He took his idiosyncrasies with him to fashion shoots, to warzones, and to the last bastion of the British Empire when he redecorated some of the rooms at the Government House in Calcutta, so that they “became slightly Edwardian, very feminine and almost human”. Beaton’s enchanted admiration for the very feminine began when he was only three years old.

In his Photobiography of 1951, Beaton recounts how he “used to be allowed to scramble in my mother’s large bed and nestle close to her while she sipped on an early morning cup of tea and opened her letters. One morning during this customary treat, my eyes fell on a postcard lying in front of me on the pink silk eiderdown and the beauty of it caused my heart to leap.”

The picture was of the actress Lily Elsie, whose “neck, in its full swanlike glory, was surrounded by an elaborate filigree of diamonds, while her hair was piled in billowing clusters of curls. To make the whole effect more unbearably beautiful, the photograph had been tinted, the cheek and lips of this divine creature were of a translucent pink that I could never hope to acquire from my box of crayons, and the tulle corsage of her pale yellow dress was spangled with tinsel stardust. My passion for Miss Lily Elsie and my interest in photography were thus engendered at the same time.”

Beaton grew up in a nice house in Hampstead in north London. He was born the same year as his grandfather died and left a fortune of £155,000 (seventeen million pounds in today’s money) from his company the Beaton Brothers. Cecil’s father (Ernest) took over the timber business, but things did not go so well when road builders began to replace his sleepers with modern pavement. It was not that Cecil hated his father, but he could do without the whole masculine domain of circumstances and (as he told John Freeman) his father’s “rather hearty friends that he brought home for dinner on Saturday nights, all that meant nothing to me. That sort of laughter in the billiard room was a world that I knew nothing about and had a slight antipathy to.”

It is very telling how Beaton is using a condescending tone to infantilise his father in Photobiography, and how he endows the women of his childhood with joyous memories and recognition: “Although my father took photographs by squeezing a rubber ball attached to an end of an umbilical cord affixed to a largish camera of indefinite make, it was Alice Collard, my sisters’ nurse, with her No 2 Box Brownie, who first brought any great enthusiasm for photography into the family.”

The daily climax in his young life was the fashion illustrations in the Evening Standard, and the sensuality of daubing these rich plates with his watercolours: “Sometimes, on red-letter days, Bessie Ascough sketched a picture of a lady in court dress, replete with feathers, bouquet and train; or she might draw a robe de bal, giving a wonderful facsimile of all the embroidery of the dress. Her particular skill was manifest in the roses that she drew, roses like balloons or billiard balls, with great round centres.” His parents “deemed it” – as Beaton put it in The Glass of Fashion (1954), his successful and very original summary of dress culture, and of the real shepherds of fashion, in the first half of the 20^th century – “unwise to allow these apoplectic expectancies to continue: the child was becoming peculiar.”

One such peculiarity was his “keen perverse enjoyment in scrutinising photographs of stage scenery. The more blatantly these showed the tricks and artifices of the stage, which would never be obvious to a theatre audience, the greater the pleasure [Photobiography].” Cecil’s brother (Reggie) committed suicide at a young age so his two remaining siblings, Baba and Nancy, were quite on the feminine side of things – though “they were rather ugly little schoolgirls” who he transformed in his own designs of camp glamour and photographed them against his contrived backgrounds.

“Cecil Beaton was an artist who took the artificiality of photography and, by exaggerating it, made it into a medium for telling the truth,” writes Wendy Lesser in His Other Half: Men Looking at Women Through Art. She is also right in that Beaton always “insured that his photographed world would not visibly resemble our daily world. Despite this, his pictures comment trenchantly and enduringly on the reality to which they bear such an oblique relation.”

The only thing he didn’t approve of about his elegant mother was that her father was a common blacksmith. He flaunted his folly by presenting her and other women of his young life as society ladies in the London papers. Mother Etty was at times an inspiration of artifice in the way she dressed: “On one occasion she wore a large special bunch of imitation lilies of the valley on her bosom, pinned to a green chiffon scarf. This sunburst of artificial flowers was a revelation, because I had not thought lilies of the valley could be simulated [The Glass of Fashion].”

But when it came to artifice and irreverent extravagance, the full monty, Beaton got all he could ask for of inspirational festiveness from his one and only aunt who “relished the fact that her appearances involved hours of preparation” and who overdressed for all of her minor entertainments: “To Aunt Jessie I own my first real glimpse of the world of fashion, of that whole grown-up world from which a child is so often excluded,” he wrote. “Aunt Jessie was the outsider, the magic relation who provided those special treats and fantasies that are so dear to childhood. She made one feel that one went back to reality after leaving her [ibid].”

In the television documentary Beaton by Bailey (1970), which was “hosted” by big-name photographer David Bailey but directed by Bill Verity, Diana Vreeland (editor of American Vogue at the time) says something that rings very true: “You see, what I like about Cecil is that he has a great deal of the outrageous in him, he insists on the outrageous.” All that derring-do that distinguished Cecil Beaton did not fair so well when he had to face up to the realities of the British school system and the ruffians that would become the ogres of the country’s establishment. At age seven he was inevitably dragged into Heath Mount School and into the uncharted world of boys and scrotum hormones: “Suddenly out of nowhere the bullies arrived. They had recognised the quarry in me. Growling like wire-haired terriers. They were large and solid, with hairy stockings and rough tweeds.”

His primary bully was Evelyn Waugh, who he nonetheless photographed in 1955 with a fence and a warning sign between them: Entrée interdite. (“He thinks that I am a nasty piece of goods, and – oh brother – I feel the same way about him.”) Beaton was something of a dud in school, and he never learned the things you are expected to learn (nor did he read a book until he was eighteen), but “Absolutely, everything about him was an aesthete,” as Cyril Connolly remembered their time together at the repugnant St Cyprian’s School in Eastbourne. “He lived for his feelings and his response to art, and in his case it was the theatre.”

The sport was to get in favour with the sadistic headmistress (known as “Mum”) of this seaside establishment, for the simple matter that it would provide a chance to make life worth living. Beaton felt ashamed by his horrible tactics, but as he expressed it in an interview decades away from St Cyprian’s: “I suppose in a way it was really good training for later in life.” In Enemies of Promise (1938), Connolly recalled his semesters with his two schoolmates:

“[George] Orwell proved to me that there existed an alternative to character, Intelligence. Beaton showed me another, Sensibility. He had a charming, dreamy face, enormous blue eyes with long lashes and wore his hair in a fringe. His voice was slow, affected and creamy. He was not good at games or work but he escaped persecution through good manners, and a baffling independence. We used to mow the lawn together behind an old pony, sit eating the gooseberries in the kitchen garden or pretend to polish brass in the chapel; from Orwell I learnt about literature, from Cecil I learnt about art.”

Next was Harrow, the straw-hat private school in northwest London, where he was allowed to show his talents in art class. Apart from that “I just felt, to begin with, that I didn’t like that sort of herding together,” Beaton told Freeman in the BBC programme. “I hated the stink of the swimming bath in the morning, and it took me some time to find some congenial friends, people who hated it as much as I did.”

What began in the autumn of 1922 were a number of years of advanced social development at St John’s College – without any kinds of academic achievements – where Beaton, rich in determination, proved himself well adapted to develop the town’s theatre life and the hedonism inside Cambridge University.

“I was thrilled by the fact that certain people would give up life to aestheticism,” he wrote in his diary that became his many famous diaries that lasted from 1922 to 1980. “Cecil treated the published diary in much the same way he treated his published portrait photographs. He retouched them shamelessly until he achieved the effect he sought,” writes his biographer Hugo Vickers in the foreword to The Unexpurgated Beaton: The Cecil Beaton Diaries as He Wrote Them, 1970–1980. “Thus, in the published diary, opinions are softened, celebrity figures are hailed as wonders and triumphs, whereas in the originals, Cecil can be as venomous as anyone I have ever read or heard in the most shocking of conversations.”

Photography authority Philippe Garner has expressed that “Cecil Beaton cast himself as a dandy not just in the superficial sense of one who paid undue attention to his clothes and grooming, but in the more complex sense of one who desired a role for himself as the eternal outsider.”

In Cambridge, Beaton “set about to become a rabid aesthete”. What is known is that Beaton’s student pad was the most lavish in town with the walls painted in cerise, gold furniture and every other detail in emerald green, including his lovebird. He looked like a punk Quentin Crisp, with varnished nails, lipstick, eyeliner, earrings, necklace and a big hat. One of his opulent roles was at the ADC Theatre where he designed almost every bit for the Footlights Dramatic Club and also performed in their plays and revues.

“Your inspirations are what will make your photographic life exciting. And your desire for recreating beauty will overlook all forms of hard work and discouragements,” Beaton said in 1938. His photography saved him from what he feared the most – “the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary” – a life less extraordinary. His father was paying a Holborn office a pound each week after Cambridge just for putting up with his objectionable son. Cecil was drowning like a fish on dry land.

He went to Venice in the summer of 1926 and then befriended the (untalented) super aesthete Stephen Tennant in December, who introduced him to some of the greatest artistic leaders of the era, the siblings Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell. And from there on Beaton could allow himself to be conscious that the things he did were the things he had always wanted to do.

“I became a great good friend of the three of them,” Beaton says in Beaton by Bailey. “And through them I think I got my first foot into the door of the sort of life in London that I really was craving for. My name became really quite well known in various strange ways. An uncle came to dinner one night, and he said that he had been to a vaudeville theatre in Edgware Road and some red-nosed comedian had ended his act by saying, ‘I am just going off to be photographed by Cecil Beaton.’”

The diary entries became markedly less fervent in February 1927. Beaton had suddenly got so much to do, photographing his famous new acquaintances, designing fancy dresses for the Bright Young Things and doing a wide range of work for Vogue in Britain.

Evelyn Waugh caricatured Beaton as the photographer and social climber David Lennox in his first novel Decline and Fall in 1928. “Forty-five years ago, photographers weren’t thought of as being particularly eminent,” Beaton told Freeman in 1962. “I took these photographs that were considered revolutionary and fantastic, and I had an exhibition of them. And from the moment the show was on they just clicked because there hadn’t been celebrity photographs in that particular way.” The booming show was at the Cooling Galleries on Fleet Street in 1927. The success was repeated three years later in connection with the publication of his first book, The Book of Beauty.

In 1928 Beaton stepped ashore in New York (“there were crowds waiting to welcome everyone but me”) with fifty pounds in his pocket and a letter of introduction from the Sitwells. On this first stay he met Bessie Marbury – who was the great literary agent and theatre producer of the time – and he met her former lover, Elsie de Wolfe, the widely known socialite who is regarded as the first professional interior designer. (“She is the sort of wildly grotesque artificial creature I adore,” penned Beaton in his diary.) de Wolfe doted on the meticulously attired young man with his mannerisms and natural endowments. She presented an exhibition of his illustrations in her gallery on Fifth Avenue, Beaton’s first in New York.

When Beaton came back to London he had signed a “lifetime” contract (which lasted until 1955) with Condé Nast. It says a lot about Beaton’s disinterest in the technical side of photography that he still worked with the Kodak pocket camera that he got from his parents on his twelfth birthday when he made the acquaintance of Edna Woolman Chase, the long-standing editor of American Vogue. Nast got him into working with a Rolleiflex and a big studio camera (which he did not know the name of), though he never had a studio of his own. Beaton wanted to remain an amateur in the same sense as Orson Welles used the word: someone who loves what he does.

It was common practice that Beaton talked about his photography in past sense, however: “I wasn’t very interested in the sitters themselves. I wanted to make pictures with the camera, I wanted to make something that didn’t really look like a photograph,” he told Freeman. In a very good interview with Rosa Reilly in the April issue of Popular Photography in 1938, Beaton signalled that he still was looking for the end of the rainbow.

And he was comparing photography to a fancy dress party: “I think this medium suited me extremely well for the years in which I happened to be in the frame of mind to do camera work. Photography gave me a tremendous amount of results. Just as in that period I loved parties madly, used to stay up all night and dance frenziedly – I gave fancy dress parties and behaved hysterically. Photography was all a part of that life. But I find that one can have too many costume parties.”

Anita Loos joined Beaton in New York in the winter of 1929 and they travelled to Los Angeles together. Beaton’s mission was to photograph the actresses of Hollywood for Vanity Fair and to fill up The Book of Beauty. Beaton took Hollywood by storm and he spent the New Year with Mr and Mrs Rosebud at their San Simeon palace north of Los Angeles.

Anita Loos was Beaton’s best friend in Hollywood and she opened a whole lot of doors for him there. “My first impressions of a film studio were so strange and fantastic that I felt I could never drain their photographic possibilities,” Beaton wrote in his diary. “The vast soundstages, with the festoons of ropes, chains, and the haphazard impediments, were as lofty and awe-inspiring as cathedrals; the element and paradox and surprise was never-ending, and the juxtaposition of objects and people gave me my first glimpse of Surrealism.”

His first visit to Hollywood was also a clandestine attempt to find the woman who he wanted to make his wife, Greta Lovisa Gustafsson. He did not photograph Garbo until she appeared in his suite at the Plaza Hotel in New York in 1946 – five years after she had abandoned her acting career at the age of thirty-six – and they talked about a life together that would involve the chance of facing each other in pyjamas each morning. “She is as beautiful as the aurora borealis,” he wrote in 1937. “Her nose is so delicate and sensitive that she seems to be conscious of perfumes too subtle for others to enjoy.”

A few of the portraits from this sitting are in the splendid Beaton retrospective Cecil Beaton – Master of Photography – which covers his portraiture from the late 1920s to the early 1970s – at Sven-Harry’s Art Museum in Stockholm. The walls in the exhibition are colour coded: a dull ice-cream green for the artists, generic gallery-white for the actors and actresses, while the blue room is a mixed bag of portraits. One would have wished a much more daring choice of colours – Beaton, for sure, would have sneered “retina irritant” – but the quality and the verisimilitude of Beaton’s props-and-people fantasies really make these images speak for themselves.

Truman Capote: “There is almost no first-rate contemporary photographer of any nationality who is not to some degree indebted to Cecil Beaton. Why? Look at his pictures.”

Photographer Patrick Anson said of Beaton’s pictures that “The extraordinary thing is that he is really a diarist of what our world has been.” The fact that the exhibition is full of genuinely famous faces that few will recognise today (and heaven knows he absolutely met and photographed them all), makes one kind of extra dreamy and humble and yearning in front of many of the portraits at Sven-Harry’s.

One of the earliest pictures in Stockholm (and an exception as it’s not a vintage print) is his silvery portrait of the London socialite Paula Gallibrand from 1928, with her oval Modigliani face and lovely round belly. A note from Beaton’s diary: “For beauty’s sake she should never smile her peculiarly ludicrous smile, but for humanity’s sake she does and should. There is no more reassuring or nicer smile.” Sail on, silvergirl. Your time has come to shine again.

Beaton had too much of the theatre in his mind in the 1920s to be a really great portraitist. Many of his pictures from this decade are loud of everything but the sitter. A classic Beaton that is missing here is his portrait of Stephen Tennant as Prince Charming on lit de parade (1927). But the only picture that is truly missing in the show is the pinnacle of all Beaton’s photography: his haunting and heartbreakingly beautiful en face portrait of the traumatised Romanov princess Natalia Paley (1935) where he so much mastered the shadows and erased the right side of her face. A bouquet of flowers is growing out of her chest. Boris Vian put a surrealistic water lily – and the same suffering and sorrow – in Cloé’s lung twelve years later in his novel L’Écume des jours.

Beaton designed for the stages in London throughout the 1930s, but it was as a photographer that he thrived. Surrealism and his work for Vogue were two things that made photography the centre of his creativity. As Donald Albrecht argues in his book about Beaton’s life in New York: “As the 1930s progressed, Beaton’s romantic sensibility remained perfectly attuned to the era’s equally romantic fashion aesthetic. But Beaton also brought something to the magazine they did not: his interest in avant-garde art movements like French Surrealism and his witty Bright Young personality in the form of illustrations and articles that gave Vogue’s American readers a distinctly British slant on the two countries.”

The city itself supplied him with the necessary energy for his incessant advancements in photography: “When I think of the work I have done in photography I am often weary of it but I know I shall never give it up,” he told Rosa Reilly in 1936. “Particularly in New York would it be impossible for me not to take pictures. New York is like electricity. The efficiency and vitality of all America is transmuted to me here. The tempo is so fast I can’t paint or write – or even read. But it makes me photograph as madly – as frenziedly as ever I danced at fancy dress ball.”

He stayed at the Waldorf Astoria, the Ritz-Carlton and the Ambassador when he worked in New York. His beloved home at home was an old farmhouse in Wiltshire (near Bath), which he transformed into a dreamworld for his tastes – featuring an exceptionally delightful circus-themed master bedroom designed by Rex Whistler with a ravishing unicorn poster bed – and which he wrote a book about some years after the contract ran out, Ashcombe: The Story of a Fifteen-Year Lease (1949). It is a miracle how he managed to do all the things that he did, and with such a steady flow of quality and vitality. Beaton was like the feline in Wilde’s cracking epigram: “If you want a lesson in elaborate artificiality, just watch the studied unconcern of a Persian cat entering a crowded salon.”

In the excellent portrait book Cecil Beaton: Portraits and Profiles, Hugo Vickers writes how Beaton “pandered to their egos while riding on their coat tails” (sometimes it was the other way around with the celebrities). The British royalties began to call for him. “In the 1930s, many British aristos found themselves unable to keep their right arm vertical. Like their fellow nobs in France, Prussia and Spain, they clung to Fascism as an antidote to democracy and in the hope of keeping their loot. Nazism’s whack ball theories of racial hierarchy chimed with toffs’ daft belief in natural aristocracy and breeding,” writes Glen Newey on the LRB blog (July 21, 2015). “And there was the Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, in later years the dear old ‘queen mum’, whose tastes in booze, cloche hats and ultra-rightist politics had already ossified in the early 1930s.”

Beaton had no issues with the court’s offensive arm stretches or Wallis Simpson’s friendship with the Führer. In February 1938 he stabbed American Vogue in the back. The damage caused by a sketch that he had produced with a punch line about “dirty kikes” was substantial, and the magazine removed and reprinted what remained of the 150,000 copies that had been distributed to the newsstands. Beaton’s response to the Vogue debacle was his regular stance of studied unconcern. But it was, quite ironically, his royal engagements that once more would open the doors for him at Condé Nast.

Baudelaire was the first to realise how dandyism was in opposition to aristocracy and at once its refiner. Beaton was a snob, but he was a real snob. He portrayed many of the narrow-minded aristos he didn’t like as single beings, whereas he often used mirrors or montage to multiply a person whose charms and talents he adored in a single frame (as with his great portrait from October 1972 of the three Charlotte Ramplings). Sven-Harry’s offers guided “queer” tours for the crowns of Swedish PC dogma but nothing of the kind for white heterosexual males who have been deprived of every right to exist. Welcome to the most equal nation in the world, some of you.

The forward-thinking brilliance of Beaton’s unconventional fashion photography, in which he pictured his smartly dressed models as they were idling in unglamorous settings with his added miscellaneous everyday articles for surreal effects where the viewer had to fill in the blanks, was mostly more of a nuisance for American Vogue at the time. The pictures from his 1937 session among the cement and the debris of a construction site on the Champs-Elysées barely passed the magazine’s restrictions but became widely imitated by others.

“Fashion photography has become altogether too genteel and refined to suit me. I want to make photographs of very elegant women taking grit out of their eyes, or blowing their noses, or taking lipstick off their teeth. Behaving like human beings in other words. Not women who are always on the crest of the wave,” he told Rosa Reilly in Popular Photography. “It would be gorgeous instead of illustrating a woman in a sport suit in a studio, to take the same woman in the same suit in a motor accident, with gore all over everything and bits of the car here and there. But naturally that would be forbidden.”

There are two Churchills in the exhibition. Beaton photographed the surly Prime Minister at his writing desk at 10 Downing Street in November 1940: “The PM settled himself and stared into my camera like a bulldog guarding its kennel. Click!” His niece Clarissa Churchill looks as if she carries the whole world on her shoulders, but the only “props” in this classic portrait from 1949 are her gloves, with one of her hands bare. It feels like you could tell how much Beaton liked a person by how much he accentuated the sitter’s hands. Beaton was wonderful with hands. They were two extra faces.

From March 1942 to July 1944, Beaton served for the Ministry of Information and photographed the fall of the British Empire in Egypt, India and China in his own peculiar fashion. “The entwining of Beaton’s social conservation with his sexual self-fashioning had significant consequences for his representation of British masculinity during the war,” writes Martin Francis in Penultimate Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain. Beaton’s cheesecake pictures of Johnny Weissmuller had proved too much for MGM in 1932 – such excursions aside, “he usually preferred to develop his bohemian queer aesthetic more covertly”.

Picasso had not been able to concentrate on his work for months when Beaton met him at 7 rue des Grands Augustins in November 1944, due to the great number of GIs who descended on him after the Liberation of Paris. He photographed Picasso sitting on the edge of the studio’s bathtub in a fine suit, away from everybody in his modest bathroom sanctuary. Beaton was going the other way. “Now, with nothing specific to keep me in England, there was time to settle down and relish to the full infinite delights that New York has to offer,” he confided to his diary in 1946.

In England he had a secretary, a chef and others who followed him between his home at 8 Pelham Place in Kensington and his mansion Reddish House near Salisbury. “Cecil created illusions,” explains his biographer. “His day began early and he worked in bed. He might be checking page proofs, selecting photographs, writing his diary, or talking on the phone, and he would not rise until shortly before his first appointment. If, for example, he were going out for lunch, he would shave and dress just before going out, thus arriving looking fresher and more clean-shaven than the other guests who had been out all morning. He liked the image of Renaissance man or man of leisure. It was deceptive. He had been working very hard indeed.”

In 1953 he photographed Elizabeth Taylor (“this monster,” he called her in a diary entry from 1971, “this great thick revolting mass of femininity in its rawest”) – it was obvious that Beaton did not nourish the same hope as Warhol to be reincarnated as the greatest diamond on her ring finger – and he photographed Elizabeth II in her coronation robes against a fake backdrop of Westminster Abbey during a three-hour session at the Buckingham Palace:

“The Queen stood looking very inanimate and it was for me now to keep her alert and amused. Luckily it seems to me that the Royal Family have only to get a glimpse of me for them to be convoluted with giggles. Long may that amusement continue for it helps enormously to keep the activities alive. Throughout the afternoon I found that it was very easy to reduce the Queen to a condition of almost ineradicable four ire and thus prevented many of the pictures looking sullen or morose [1955].”

Five portraits from the sitting with Ingrid Bergman in 1958 are in the exhibition as well, and they serve as a great reminder to go and see Stig Björkman’s no-nonsense documentary I Am Ingrid (2015). Beaton’s 1955 portrait of the eighty-year-old Bernard Berenson (with one hand grasping his walking stick and the other posed in front of him) in the centre of an avenue of lime trees is lovely. “I was impressed by the fact that age could not wither Berenson’s interest in life and people,” Beaton remarked for himself. “As he commented on the beauty around him, I was aware that, in his company, life took on added intensity.”

TS Eliot’s hands are as dominant as his face in Beaton’s superbly composed picture of him, in which the reflections on the writer’s glasses and on the rippled window behind his back make all the difference. Beaton met Marilyn Monroe in a New York hotel suite in 1956. “If this star is an abandoned sprite, she touchingly looks to her audience for approval,” he wrote – adding: “It will probably end in tears.” Beaton found this sprite very easy to like, and “I was so impressed by the sort of gaiety and the variety of moods that she had that I just wanted to catch that, so I did not concentrate on the background at all.” Beaton’s photography became less and less showy and opulent the more he worked within the theatre, opera, ballet and film, the closer he came to the end his rainbow.

Nancy Hall Duncan mentions in The Berg Companion to Fashion that Beaton “had an exclusive knowledge of Victorian and Edwardian photography and drew for inspiration on the costume depiction of such 19^th-century portrait photographers as Camille Silvy and the collaborators DO Hill and Robert Adamson. He was also inspired by the soft-focus technique of the photographer EO Hoppé, the opalescent lighting of Baron Adolf de Meyer, and conventions of English portraiture and Renaissance painting.”

Beaton received his first Oscar for Gigi in 1958 (for Costume Design) and his second and third in 1964 for My Fair Lady (also for Best Art Direction). In the 1954 November issue of American Vogue – before he switched to Harper’s Baazar and other magazines – Beaton had described Audrey Hepburn’s stance as “a combination of an ultra fashion plate and a ballet dancer”. (She was a kind-of ballet dancer as much as she was a kind-of actress.) The portrait at Sven-Harry’s shows Hepburn in her “lady” costume, though she was so much prettier as the Covent Garden flower girl. Another little butterfly stuck on the pin.

(Beaton photographed the other Hepburn in 1936, but they despised each other unreasonably. As Vreeland expressed it, “He picks his enemies beautifully, doesn’t he?”)

Wendy Lesser: “The musical comedy based on Shaw’s Pygmalion was in any case a perfect vehicle for Beaton, as a male photographer who repeatedly transformed hired models into exclusively dressed ladies, he was well equipped to understand the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea.”

The National Gallery in London had a great exhibition of his work in 1968 called Beaton Portraits. The 1960s were inevitably an era with people who liked to behave badly – the Rat Pack, the Rolling Stones, Warhol with his entourage of fuckups – but if you want someone who actually rebelled against something then look at the picture that Beaton took of Rudolf Nureyev in 1962 (the year after he had defected to the West), just out of the shadows and what a star.

The portraits he took of Twiggy in his London home are conventional girlie Twiggy pictures and they are only interesting because they show a little of the inside of 8 Pelham Place. Barbara Streisand was another thing. She was only twenty-one when Beaton made her look like a woman in a classic Nefertiti representation made in Hollywood in 1963.

Streisand has remained very thankful for what Beaton did to her: “When I started in the 60s, the beauty symbols were young girls like Sandra Dee. Cute blondes, with little turned-up noses. And a lot of people, including my mother, didn’t think I’d ever be a movie star. And it was quite a thing for me, all of a sudden, to have Cecil Beaton say he thought I was one of the most beautiful women in the world. It was great. I mean, he liked the bump on my nose.”

“She reminded me of Edith Sitwell,” Beaton noted in the diary. “Sitwell and Streisand – both were very willing to experiment, even willing to compromise. Classically beautiful women are seldom willing to experiment. They are less evolved, because the mirror and the man tell them they’ve reached a state of perfection, never mind that it’s subjective and entirely physical.”

In the 1970s Beaton photographed Diana Vreeland (“Everything about her features is animated by amused interest”), he photographed Gilbert and George and created one of his very best pictures, showing the couple as they pass or caress or threaten each other at the black-squared cellar entrance at Pelham Place, and he photographed David Hockney in his not best choice of outfit. In Beaton by Bailey, Beaton is taking random pictures of Hockney in front of his almost finished masterpiece Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1971).

In this documentary, Truman Capote is full of words and hidden praise for Beaton: “Cecil’s own vision of himself is that he has a great deal of grand seigneur about him, and he is both very vain and very modest at the same time. And he has social vanity, which is amusing and unique and I like it, it is part of his charm. He has great certainty about himself in all social situations.”

But Beaton wasn’t sure about himself in 1970. The diaries make known of a man who is tortured by excruciating headaches and not a little self-doubt. In 1974 Beaton suffered a severe stroke that partially disabled him. He was brave but things were not the same anymore. When he died six years later he had lived for seventy-six years and four days.

As the two photographers sat down at Reddish House, chatting like old chums in his Pierre Paulin chairs, Beaton told Bailey in his nasal, creamy dandy tone: “If I can look animated there is some hope for all of us. Otherwise it is just too depressing.”

Cecil Beaton refused to be bored chiefly because he wasn’t boring.

Cecil Beaton with Mickey in the garden at Reddish House in 1963. © The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s.

Cecil Beaton – Master of Photography at Sven-Harrys konstmuseum in Stockholm through August 30, 2015.

DJURGÅRDEN (PART SEVEN)

Djurgården, Stockholm.

GOODBYE BLUE SKY

Emil Nolde, The Sea III, 1913. © Nolde Stiftung Seebüll.

Nolde appeared as a solitary genius, an uneducated peasant who somehow knew what the educated could not know, who saw what the prophet saw, who felt what others could not feel. A man obsessed by his urge to create, unconcerned about the public and the social whirl, the servant of an inner demon that guides his art – such is the image of Emil Nolde.

– Stephen Bronner, Modernism at the Barricades: Aesthetics, Politics, Utopia

The steep and giddy steps to the upper floor of the Haus der deutschen Kunst (the House of German Art) – the brand new propaganda temple at the beginning of Prinzregentenstrasse in Munich – was a deliberate attempt to provoke a nauseous prelude to what the visitors were about to see and experience, and what they were supposed to deride, now when civilisation was going to hell again.

This was the summer of 1937. The dubious star of the Entartete Kunst (degenerate art) exhibition was an Expressionist of the absolute greatest artistry. He was also a wrongheaded fool who rendered himself a well-earned chapter in Who’s Who in Nazi Germany.

The many words of Emil Nolde (1867–1956) were “full of vituperative statements about Jews to whom he denied ‘soul and creative spirit’,” as Robert Wistrich demonstrates in this dictionary. “Nolde praised the ‘upraising against Jewish power, dominant in all the arts’ and expected to be exalted as the most German of all artists.” Such was not the case. When the Nazis came to power they regarded Nolde as the most “Jewish” of them all. You find the same kind of logic in Fahrenheit 451 (1966) when the book burners murder a library and Truffaut’s camera zooms in on a copy of Mein Kampf in flames.

“Within national boundaries, race as a basis judgement in matters of art and thought helps carry on the critics’ war. It nourishes self-approval, stiffens factions, and decides among imponderables,” wrote Jacques Barzun in an essay from 1936 (“Race: Fact or Fiction?”) when the Third Reich was about to realise the Shoah on the impetus of Europe’s cauldron. “The idea of race makes easy the transition from cultural to political ill-feeling, and when we want to condemn some course of national action in our neighbours, race provides the universal joint that holds together the aliens’ ignoble traditions, their present shameful course, and their innate perversity. This pattern of judgement is familiar to contemporaries of the First World War, in which a sincere belief in the wickedness of Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche – ‘cultural poisons’ – strengthened the hatred of the enemy.”

There is no way of getting around Nolde’s cultural poison. But his intense art, as this summer’s refulgent Nolde exhibition at Waldemarsudde in Stockholm will tell you, is strangely almost spared from the wickedness of his politics and from the nightmare worlds in which he lived. In that respect he was like a Ferdinand the Bull who – unlike the other Expressionists with their avant-garde depictions of war and misery, and their forms of emotional contortion – preferred his flowers to the tug of the bullring.

“For the Expressionists, art and religion were closely intertwined. Both involved surrender to an inner, spiritual energy and a preoccupation with the human soul,” writes Starr Figura in the MoMA publication German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse. “Although they lived in an age of intellectual scepticism and philosophical nihilism, these artists were nevertheless repeatedly and inexorably drawn to the Christian themes and motifs that had shaped German life and culture for centuries. A desire to comprehend events in mystical or spiritual terms was reflected in their current images of prophets and seers, and the belief that theirs was an age of apocalyptic transformation manifested itself in various images of creation, rebirth, and transcendence.”

The French Impressionists of the late 1800s captured and emphasised the sensations of light, and they loved to arrange their impressions around the merriments of life. The German Expressionists wanted to deliver the world from itself. It began in 1905 with Die Brücke in Dresden (their name was taken from Nietzsche: “What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end”), an artist group that proceeded from their lively use of colours and contradictions, as exemplified by Stephen Bronner in Modernism at the Barricades:

“Die Brücke spoke to a new community bound by feeling – but that new community was a figment of its imagination. Its members’ notion of solidarity was actually directed to them rather than the proletariat or even humanity. The journal of Die Brücke – only one issue appeared – had a title that makes this apparent. It comes from a line by Horace: Odi profanum vulgus.” Indeed, the Expressionists loathed the populace.

The modern world began with a sway towards the premodern. The revolutionary Expressionists were yearning after a primordial state of rural simplicity and uncorrupted contentment. The concept of Heimat (German soil and blood and all that) was pitched with fierce subjectivism, storms of colour, and exaggeration and distortion to the point of ecstasy.

Nolde was as hostile to every form of aesthetic relation between styles as he was about human relations between “races”. His professedly unspoilt art was aimed for the “tougher Nordic senses”. Nietzsche wrote in Beyond Good and Evil (1886) that, “In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.” Nolde was an individual twit, but here and there and quite often he was sublime in his art.

The headstrong yet thin-skinned artist was reaching for an unmixed purity in his use of colours as well. “Nolde subordinated all other pictorial elements to colour,” explains Peter Selz in German Expressionist Painting. “It was no longer employed primarily for its representational value or for its decorative quality, but was more symbolic and expressive. Nolde always retained contact with nature, but he seemed to anticipate Kandinsky’s later concepts of the spiritual value of pure colour as an expression of human emotion. Nolde said that he often considered himself only a medium through which colour could exercise its powerful effect on canvas.”

Nolde: “Colours, the materials of the painter: colours in their own lives, weeping and laughing, dream and bliss, hot and scared, like love songs and the erotic, like songs and glorious chorales! Colours in vibration, pealing like silver bells, proclaiming happiness, passion and love, soul, blood and death.”

The Waldemarsudde exhibition, which counts thirty-seven oil paintings, thirty-six watercolours and eighteen graphic prints, is called Colour Storms. And here we are, on a beach in Denmark with the earliest work in Stockholm – Lichte Meeresstimmung (1901) – a stylistically dateless painting where the not quite achromatic stratums of cream and cobalt blue emerge as a peaceful composition of the sky, the sea and the sand. Nolde must have painted this with a seashell to his ear. His many seascapes (and they are many) that came later are unsurpassed. Emil Nolde is alone in the history of art to have painted the sea with such drama, accuracy and beauty.

The Denmark paintings are also the starting point for Museum Director Karin Sidén when she describes her idea behind Colour Storms for The Stockholm Review: “His early work from the period before he developed his characteristic Expressionist style is represented by two paintings in the exhibition. A comparison is hereby made possible between the works from around 1900, influenced by the Skagen School of Painting and Impressionism, and the vividness and colouristic intensity that he developed in his painting from the period of Die Brücke 1906–07 and later. The exhibition is only organised chronologically in the first gallery, but then transitions into a thematic presentation distributed partly on thematic categories, partly on artistic techniques. His watercolour painting, which of course is outstanding, is allowed to unfold to full extent in a large room and the experimental graphic prints in another.”

Much of Nolde’s painting during the first ten years of the 1900s, when he gradually turned on the colours, is a blustering but evidently talented sequel to the style that the French had been up to for a few decades and which he claimed to despise for its “weakness”, “sweetness” and “superficiality”.

Nolde was passionate about van Gogh’s Mediterranean swirls of paint and the stark exoticism of Gauguin’s pictures from Tahiti. (“I have never before seen such glorious colours in modern art.”) But when he found his own style as an artist around 1906 with a painting like Freigeist it was all about glaring Expressionismus, Germania, and visions that originated from his inner self.

And this is how he described the four potato-faced men in their intensely coloured caftans – hot pink, orange, green and blue – and their Renaissance gestures: “The free spirit stands in the middle of the picture. Praise to the left, complaints and reproach to the right – none of that touches him. The central picture is surely meant to be myself.”

Nolde’s paintings do not possess the luminosity of Kandinsky’s works from the same time. There is some other intrinsic quality in these pictures that makes them shine, and Stephen Bronner comes really close to it in his book: “By understanding singularity as oneness with nature, by highlighting an inner ecstasy, Nolde’s work sought to manifest the ‘pulse-beat of the entire world’.”

In his autobiography (made up of four books), Nolde talked about how “the love for the extraordinary which existed in me at that time has always remained with me. My interest in what is foreign, primeval and primitive was especially strong: I had to get to know the unknown; even the nocturnal, depraved inhabitants of the great city stimulated me like something exotic, and the Jewish types in my later religious pictures may have come into being in part from my following this drive.”

The devious-looking thumbs-up characters around Nolde’s crucified yellow Jesus in the mid panel of his triptych Martyrium I–III (1921) are a sorry set of “Jewish types”. The painting on the left is a child’s imagination of what lions may look like ­– like amok gargoyles, tearing the sinners apart inside the blood-red rink of an amphitheatre. The fantasy painting on the right is a diagonal composition of a brown mass of men in tribal masks and, on the other side of the slice, a group of naked women tied to poles. This was Nolde in his most sexual mode. Other Expressionists painted women like the fornicating, hostile flowers in Gerald Scarfe’s animation sequence for The Wall in which the female flower devours the male.

The triptych in the Colour Storms exhibition represents a main area in Nolde’s art. The majority of his religious paintings were conceived between 1909 and 1912 – following a persistent illness from drinking poisoned water – with bouts of fervency as he “painted and painted, hardly knowing whether it was night or day, whether I was a human being or only a painter”.

“The painting of The Derision of Christ [1909] saved me from drowning in religion and compassion. Here the soldiers yell and hit and taunt and spit,” Nolde wrote in the second volume of his autobiography from 1934 (awkwardly titled Jahre der Kämpfe). “I doubt that I could have painted with so much power The Last Supper and Pentecost [both 1909], both so deeply fraught with feeling, had I been bound by a rigid dogma and the letter of the bible. I had to be artistically free, not confronted by a god hard as steel like an Assyrian king, but with god inside of me, glowing and holy like the love of Christ. The Last Supper and the Pentecost marked the change from optical, external stimuli to values of inner conviction. They became milestones – in all likelihood not only for my own work.”

The religious confessions of Emil Nolde were in accord with Dostoyevsky’s spiritual emotions in The Brothers Karamazov (1880), as when Ivan K recounts the words of the Inquisitor and his parley with the official divinity of the Church: “Peacefully they will expire in your name, and beyond the grave they will find only death. But we will keep the secret, and for their own happiness we will entice them with a heavenly and eternal reward.” Nolde united an anthropocentric view of the world with a belief in a greater cosmic presence when he painted these works. He was both the soldiers and the figure of Christ.

Nolde’s grotesque figures and twisted sisters from pre-Weimar Berlin predated the great works of George Grosz, and there are a few examples of them in the exhibition. It is a fact that Nolde could be nutty in pictures even before the fine arts became his occupation. His Alpine illustrations from the mid 1890s, where the Swiss mountains come alive with human features, are as peculiar (though not anywhere near as amazing) as Magritte’s période vache of 1947–48. The pictures were reproduced as postcards by popular demand after appearing in a magazine:

“Interesting that you ask about the strange Bergpostkarten, which of course became very popular and helped to enable an economic platform for Emil Nolde’s artistic activities,” says Mrs Sidén. “The reason that the images are not included in the exhibition is that we – in cooperation with the Nolde Stiftung Seebüll – wanted to concentrate the exhibition on Nolde’s oeuvre as a ‘free’ artist, after the early years as a teacher of industrial drawing and those as a student of different painters.”

Heimat wasn’t just an idea for Nolde but an earthly reality as much as a sublime realm to which he always returned after his numerous travels. “For Nolde, the scenically unremarkable, sparsely populated reaches of his homeland – the borderland of Germany and Denmark, between the North Sea and the Baltic – retained an unspoilt, primeval character that held an irresistible appeal. He would walk for miles, and called it ‘a landscape full of experiences and history’,” writes Averil King in Emil Nolde: Artist of the Elements. “In his autobiographical writings, Nolde refers to the land where he was born as ‘a wonderland from sea to sea’ and ‘a fairy tale’. He reflected that ‘despite many travels to many places … my art remains deeply rooted in my native soul’, and it has been said of him that his creative imagination was, indeed, deeply and inextricably bound up with his homeland.”

Emil Hansen took the name of the village where he was born when he married his Danish wife Ada in 1902. “The most German of all artists” evolved from a rural upbringing dominated by laborious farm work and the actualities of local folklore and the bible. Nolde trained as a cabinetmaker in his teens, and furniture design was his profession until he moved to Switzerland in 1892 to teach at St Gallen’s School of Applied Arts. It was, as mentioned, the fairly substantial revenue from the Bergpostkarten that enabled him to go to Munich, Paris (Académie Julian) and Copenhagen to learn how to paint and to become Emil Nolde.

The Noldes rented a house on the island of Als (or Alsen which was its German name in those days) in 1903 where the artist set up a little studio by the beach. They stayed there every summer until they bought a farm on a manmade hill near the North Sea in 1916 (in the lowlands area that became Danish in 1920 – there is a photo of the couple in the Colour Storms book as they are punting through the water in a flat-bottom skiff). In 1926 they relocated to the big brown brick house with its variegated green and flowery premises that Nolde had designed for himself and his wife. Seebüll, of course, lives on as the home for the Nolde Stiftung Seebüll and the Museum, and it is also the resting place for Emil and Ada Nolde.

“Intellectuals and literati call me an Expressionist; I do not like this narrow classification. A German artist that I am.” Thus spoke Emil Nolde. It was during a trip through Italy and a long stay in Taormina in Sicily during the winter of 1904–05 that Nolde turned on his colours. The reclusive Nolde accepted Die Brücke’s invitation to join the group and to work with them in Dresden in March and April 1907. It was this brief séjour with Die Brücke that really made him an Expressionist.

Peter Selz: “Returning to solitary Alsen, Nolde continued to paint garden and flower pieces for some time. His motifs never varied much, and certain ones were treated fifteen and twenty times with the greatest perseverance to bring them to full maturity. In his garden pictures of 1907 and 1908 the subject – a bed of flowers or an individual flower – is no longer a function of the environment as in his early semi-Impressionist pictures; instead, the object has become individualised and much more subjective: it is now the carrier of the painter’s own dynamic emotion expressed in pure symbolic colour.”

Bauern (Viborg) (1908) is one such painting in the exhibition, a nightly motif of a group of hardly visible peasants and some masterstrokes of blue – and then this boom of glowing green that manifests itself through one of the men. Superb.

The neoromantic Nolde was horrified by how “everything is being discovered and Europeanised” and lamented the loss of the good old days. (“The period from 1871 to the turn of the century, the Gründerzeit [founding period], with its economic boom, was fateful for the more refined old cultural and popular values; they were ignored, squandered, destroyed.”) Nolde found what he was looking for in Germany’s ethnological museums, in the savage purity of indigenous peoples and in the primordial forces that (as he also figured it) lay behind their art.

He wrote in his autobiography that “primitive men live in their nature: they are one with it and part of the entire universe. I sometimes have the feeling that they are the only real human beings left, while we are something like malformed marionettes, artificial and full of presumption.”

When Max Liebermann and Paul Cassirer of the alternative art organisation the Berlin Secession rejected his Pentecost in 1910, Nolde went berserk with his racist hatred and senseless accusations for their support of “Jewish” (un-German) art. “Efforts to introduce the foreign, the unknown, and the exotic were precisely what rendered the Berlin Secession suspect in the eyes of a European public whose nationalism was everywhere on the rise,” as Stephen Bronner remarks. “But the fact remains that the cosmopolitanism of the Berlin Secession, its respect for the most divergent artists and its tolerance of the most different approaches, profoundly influenced the cultural climate in which Expressionism would come to thrive.”

Galerie Commeter in Hamburg presented a full-scope show of Nolde’s graphic works that year and to much acclaim. It would have been preferable to see some of Nolde’s delightful prints from the Hamburg Harbour (also 1910) in the room with his graphic works at Waldemarsudde. As with his seascapes they do carry those very mixed human feelings of contentment and entrancement about the place and the moment, for being here, and still – a wish to be taken somewhere else.

He appreciated the mysticism of Edvard Munch, but Nolde’s seascapes are free from gimmickry – they are solely about the sea and the sky. “Nolde knows the sea as no other artist before him,” wrote his friend and benefactor Max Sauerlandt in the first biography on Nolde (1921). “He sees it not from the beach or from a boat, he sees it as it exists in itself, free from any reference to man, eternally in motion, ever changing, living out its life in and for itself: a divine, self-consuming primal being that, in its unrestricted freedom, has existed unchanged since the very first day of creation.”

It is easy to get lost in the room with Nolde’s marvellous seascapes, but there are other classy paintings (flowers, landscapes) to enjoy in here as well. Thirty-five years differ between Das Meer III, the dark wavy masterpiece from 1913 with the narrow green sky, and Hahe See – bewegte Wolken (1948) in which the orange storm clouds dominate over the high sea. Nolde never lost his touch with the ocean.

In the winter of 1913–14, the Noldes settled down in Kavieng on New Ireland after travelling through Russia and Asia in the company of a scientific expedition destined for German New Guinea. Two of the nineteen oils he painted on the island are in Colour Storms: a really quite respectful portrait of a little family – which is something else than the malformed marionettes that he found and sometimes painted at home, in the big cities – and a beguiling view by the sea, with palm trees before an exotic curtain of the Heimat North Sea and its operatic skies.

Peter Selz: “With the end of the war, and in spite of the dispersal of the artists, Expressionism suddenly found itself an accepted art form. Certain of its inherent pacifist propensities tended to ally it with the peace movement. Its search for universal forms and its sponsorship of great international exhibitions corresponded to the then prevalent dreams of a united Europe and a brotherhood of man; its intoxication with the idea of a community of artists corresponded to the plans for the new social utopias pronounced throughout Germany in the last years of the war and in the period immediately following the revolution of 1918.”

When the Allies had made up the terms that the Germans alone were responsible for the Great War and that they were going to pay for it, German diplomats were soon obliged to represent the country in the Hall of Mirrors of the Palace of Versailles on June 28, 1919: “Their task was to sign, not to negotiate. The treatment of the German delegation, widely publicised in the German press, was one long calculated insult: the train that took them to Paris moved with deliberate slowness through the battlefields of northern France until the sight became unbearable,” informs Peter Gay in Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider – his work about the Weimar Republic (1918–1933) and the “two Germanies: the Germany of military swagger, abject submission to authority, aggressive foreign adventure, and obsessive preoccupation with form, and the Germany of lyrical poetry, humanist philosophy, and pacific cosmopolitanism”.

Fuchsschwänze (1939) is Nolde’s involuntary salute to Surrealism. This is one of his greatest paintings, full of bellyache apprehension and crackerjack imagination, full of tassels of blood-red amaranth flowers – love lies bleeding – or foxtails as they are called in German (hence the title). There is so much more to this image than this scenery of perspicacious visions that appear to spurt out of a single flowerbed. The painting was one of the last he did in this new Reich he had cheered to power. Nolde, the National Socialist, was banned from making any further works of art.

The Nazis cleansed the world from poetry and purpose. It was declared at the Nuremberg “Rally of Victory” in 1933 that it was all up with the art “charlatans”. Germany’s supremacy in the fine arts and Modernism’s great achievements inside the institutions during Weimar were regarded with suspicion and disgust by the general public who was more than eager to put the blame on artists and Jews, and their connections, for everything that had gone wrong after the Treaty of Versailles: “The syphilis of anti-Semitism, which was moving towards its tertiary stage in the Weimar epoch, was not the only weakness of the German body politic. The German state was a huge creature with a small and limited brain,” argues historian Paul Johnson in Modern Times.

Nolde met the Führer and his thugs at a private dinner party in 1933. He wrote about it in a letter to his friend and patron Hans Fehr: “The Führer is great and noble in his aspirations and a brilliant man of action. He is still surrounded by a gaggle of dark figures, in an artificial culture fog. It seems that the sun will break through and scatter the fog in the near future.”

The Minister of Propaganda was initially favourably disposed towards Nolde – who declined the offers to become the President of all the Nazi art schools and to gain a professorship at the Berlin Akademie der Künste – and he was a tolerated figure until the day that the Führer found his works in the Goebbels residence and, during the bellicosity that followed, ordered them to be removed and disposed of.

“By the time, many Expressionists had left Germany, others were forbidden to work, some were incarcerated in concentration camps,” writes Ashley Bassie in Expressionism. “Ernst Barlach carved a poignant figure of a standing woman in oak in 1936. The following year he gave it its allegorical title, Das schlimme Jahr 1937 (The Terrible Year 1937), in direct response to the Entartete Kunst campaign. By the time of ‘the terrible year’, four hundred works by Barlach had been seized from public collections. He died the following year.”

By June 30, 1937, the Führer commanded the President of the Reichskammer der bildenden Künste (the Reich Chamber of Culture) Adolf Ziegler, who also happened to be his favourite painter, to “select and impound works of German art of decline since 1910 currently in the possession of the Reich, the states, and the communes, from the fields of paintings and sculpture, for the purposes of an exhibition”. In a matter of weeks, Ziegler’s team had confiscated sixteen thousand works of art – 1,054 of them were works by Nolde – for the Ministry of Propaganda. The first instalment of the Entartete Kunst spectacle opened in Munich on July 18, 1937. It was one of the most important art exhibitions of the 20^th century.

The Führer delivered his opening speech in the hall on the ground floor in this new House of German Art where The Great German Art Exhibition presented a choosy selection of totalitarian art – insipid sculptures and kitschy genre sceneries of Germania and Classical Greece – “worthy images expressing the life course of our people”. The Führer expressed his sympathy for his countrymen, the real Germans who had been forced to endure this madness of modern art:

“The mass of the people moved through our art exhibitions in a completely uninterested fashion or stayed away altogether. The people’s healthy perceptions recognised that all that canvas smearing was really the outcome of an impudent and unashamed arrogance or of a simply shocking lack of skill. Millions of people felt instinctively that these art stammers of the last few decades were more like the achievements that might have been produced by untalented children from eight to ten years of age and could under no circumstances be regarded as the expression of our own time or of the German future.”

And he concluded: “The new age of today is at work on a new human type. Tremendous efforts are being made in countless spheres of life in order to elevate our people, to make our men, boys, lads, girls, and women healthier and thereby stronger and more beautiful. From this strength and beauty streams forth a new feeling of life, and a new joy in life.”

The five thousand works of art that the Nazis threw into a bonfire on March 20, 1939 were labelled “Property of no value”. Unlike the Fascist-minded Futurists who eventually quailed at the new realities in Italy, Nolde never learned or gave in. He used the humiliation to shift his anti-Semitism into overdrive. Goebbels did not respond to his letters but some of his works were in fact returned to German museums after the tour with the Entartete Kunst exhibition. Nolde was excluded from the Reichskammer der bildenden Künste in August 1941. Between 1938 and 1945 he was prohibited to expose his art and to make a living from it.

“Many of the artists whose work had been banned, mutilated, or destroyed, had either been forced to emigrate or had been so traumatised by their experiences of Germany that they had no desire to be associated with a movement with German characteristics, even if only from the Medieval past,” reflects Rose-Carol Washton Long in the anthology New Perspectives on Brücke Expressionism: Bridging History.

In his thatched garden bungalow and in other hidden places at home at Seebüll, Nolde kept on painting paintings that did not exist. Those are the one thousand three hundred Ungemalte Bilder (unpainted paintings) that he made in secrecy and from imagination alone during the reins of the Third Reich. There are twelve unpainted paintings in the room with Nolde’s watercolours at Waldemarsudde. These works are so much on the opposite end of the wet-on-wet rubbish that Rudolf Steiner and his likes used to paint. Everything in here is a testament to Nolde’s total mastery of the medium.

“The further one removes oneself from nature and still remains natural, the greater the art,” reasoned Nolde. “Conscientious and exact information of nature does not create a work of art. A wax figure confoundingly lifelike causes nothing but disgust. A work becomes a work of art when one re-evaluates the values of nature and adds one’s own spirituality.”

The seventy-six-year-old Nolde lost all that he had stored in his Berlin studio – a lot of his graphic works and paintings by his fellow artists – when the city was bombed in March 1944. His art was suddenly lavished with the highest praise in West Germany after the war, and people seemed intentionally reluctant to remember the other bit of Nolde. Bernhard Fulda and Aya Soika write in the Colour Storms publication how “artworks like Nolde’s remind us that there is no obvious connection between modernist art and democratic values”.

Andrei Rublev is the only one who sees that nasty black thing that coils in the stream in Tarkovsky’s film from 1966. It is here in the woods that the famous icon painter vents that, “It is only through prayer that the soul reaches the invisible from the visible.” His words are for Foma, an apprentice painter with an empty understanding of the import of his work. Nolde reached the invisible from the visible through his art. He was a prophet, a seer, and a snake.

Did you ever wonder why we had to run for shelter when the promise of a brave new world unfurled beneath a clear blue sky?

Emil Nolde, Female Dancer, 1913. © Nolde Stiftung Seebüll.

Emil Nolde – Colour Storms at Waldemarsudde in Stockholm through August 30, 2015, and at Göteborgs konstmuseum in Gothenburg, October 3, 2015–January 17, 2016.