Emil Nolde

Emil Nolde, whose real name was Emil Hansen, was a farmer's son and always had close ties to nature. His love for nature never waned. He loved landscapes and preferred to live in them, whether it was on the Alsen island in the Baltic Sea, the farmhouse "Unterwarf" in Wiedau, or at his last retreat in the house at "Seebüll" in 1927. He had a passion for forests and meadows and loved to plant gardens with an abundance of colorful flowers. Nature was a source of inspiration, providing him with endless subjects for his art. "The colors of the flowers irresistibly attracted me, and all of a sudden I was painting... The purity and radiance of the flower's colors; I loved them. I loved the flowers in their destined cycle: sprouting up, opening, beaming, glowing, cheering, drooping, wilting, ending up tossed in the dump," the artist recalled his thoughts and feelings in 1906. Watercolour was ideally suited to Nolde's spontaneity and his desire for immediacy of expression. He preferred painting wet-on-wet and frequently used absorbent Japanese paper. In his work, the main part is played by color, its luminosity and sensual materiality, its layering and overlapping, merging, and symbiosis with the support. Impressed by Nolde's "torrents of color," in 1906 Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and "Die Brücke" invited him to become a member of the group, and for a brief period, he accepted. As this watercolor demonstrates, Nolde did not aim to capture a true-to-life representation but was interested in colors' intensity and luminosity, in dematerialization, controlled coincidence in the sense of écriture automatique, and the associations and ideas these could conjure up in the viewer. The pansies' merging colors are densely packed along the bottom edge of the painting. In the background, the deep pink blooms of the plumed cockscomb (celosia argentea) grow upright, ablaze with color, rendered in sweeping brushstrokes. Here, too, the artist distances himself from the real object by renouncing rigorous forms and placing an emphasis on the action of painting; he distorts and alters. This gives rise to a dynamic process, an interplay between observation and imagination. He opens up a further level of reality "beyond what can be pictorially represented," and this, in particular, encapsulates the secret of Nolde's brilliance in watercolor. original german text by Kerstin Jesse

(1) See: Emil Nolde: Mein Garten voller Blumen, exh. cat. Nolde Stiftung Seebüll, Berlin branch, Manfred Reuther (ed.), (Cologne 2010). (2) Nolde, Emil: Jahre der Kämpfe, 1902–1914, Stiftung Seebüll Ada und Emil Nolde (Cologne 2002), p. 100. Quote translated in: Emil Nolde: In Radiance and Color, Agnes Husslein-Arco and Stephan Koja (eds.), exh. cat. Österreichische Galerie Belvedere (Vienna 2013), p. 126–27 (3) Letter, see note 2, p. 98. (4) Franz Erich, “Innere Bilder”, Emil Nolde. Aquarelle und figürliche Radierungen, exh. cat. Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte Münster (Cologne 1991), p. 15.