 |
| 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 20th 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.