Emil Nolde

Emil Nolde (born Hans Emil Hansen, 1867-1956) was one of the first and most prominent German Expressionist painters. Born into a farming family near the German-Danish border, he later took the name of his home village, Nolde. His intense use of colour and expressive brushwork make him a key figure in early twentieth-century modern art. He was also a prolific printmaker, but his reputation rests mainly on his oil paintings and watercolours.

His training came late and was uneven. Between 1884 and 1891 he trained as a woodcarver and illustrator in Flensburg and worked in furniture factories. He studied at the School of Applied Arts in Karlsruhe and taught drawing in St. Gallen, Switzerland, from 1892 to 1898. After being rejected by the Munich Academy, he spent several years in private classes and visits to Paris, where he became familiar with Impressionism. In 1902 he married the Danish actress Ada Vilstrup and settled in Berlin, where he later built relationships with the collector Gustav Schiefler and with Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.

From 1906 to 1907 he belonged to the Dresden group Die Brücke, but he soon left because of differences with its much younger members. He was also a member of the Berlin Secession from 1908 to 1910, until he was excluded after a dispute with its leadership. His figures, with faces closer to masks than portraits, aim at emotion rather than beauty. Around 1906 he turned much of his work toward religious subjects, in paintings such as The Last Supper (1909) and Dance Around the Golden Calf (1910). As a watercolourist he was regarded as a virtuoso, and his stormy seascapes and flower studies are perhaps his best-known works.

From the early 1920s he supported the National Socialist German Workers' Party, joining its Danish section. He expressed antisemitic views and considered Expressionism a distinctively Germanic style. After Hitler came to power, the regime condemned his work as “degenerate art” and removed more than a thousand of his works from museums. Some were included in the 1937 exhibition despite his protests. In 1941 he was forbidden to paint, and during the war he produced hundreds of watercolours that he hid and called “Unpainted Pictures.” After the war he presented himself as a victim of Nazi persecution, and the foundation set up after his death published his memoirs without the antisemitic passages. A 2019 exhibition in Berlin again brought his Nazi allegiance to the fore, and Chancellor Angela Merkel removed two of his paintings from the chancellery.

Nolde died in Seebüll in 1956. The foundation bearing his name opened a museum in 1957, and his work is held in collections including the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, the Kunsthalle Hamburg and the Albertina in Vienna. His legacy is twofold: he is a landmark figure in the use of colour in German painting and, at the same time, a case study in the relationship between art and politics.