Emil Nolde

Biography

In 1941 Emil Nolde received a letter from the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts: “with immediate effect” he was forbidden any professional activity. He went on drawing at home in Seebüll, making small watercolours on Japanese paper, and later called them his “Unpainted Pictures”. About 1,300 of these sheets accumulated.

He was born on 7 August 1867 on a farm near the village of Nolde, not far from Tønder, as Hans Emil Hansen, the fourth of five children in a peasant family. His father was a North Frisian, and his mother spoke the Southern Jutish dialect of Danish. The school he attended was German. His youth was spent in hard work and poverty. The land was then part of Prussia; after the plebiscite of 1920 it passed to Denmark.

From 1884 Nolde studied to become a woodcarver and draughtsman at the School of Applied Arts in Flensburg, against his father’s wishes. He took part in the restoration of the Brüggemann Altar in Schleswig Cathedral and left without a diploma. He worked in furniture factories in Munich, Karlsruhe and Berlin. In 1892 he took a post as a teacher of ornamental drawing at the industrial museum in St. Gallen and held it until 1898. There he made coloured drawings of the Swiss mountains and had postcards printed from them; the income allowed him to live as an independent artist. The Munich Academy rejected him. He studied at Adolf Hölzel’s private school in Dachau, and in the autumn of 1899 went to Paris and enrolled at the Académie Julian.

In 1902 he married the Danish actress Ada Vilstrup in Copenhagen and, from that year, took the name of his native village as his surname. The couple spent summers on the island of Als and winters in Berlin.

The flower pictures and garden scenes from Als drew the attention of Die Brücke, the Dresden Expressionist group. In 1906 Nolde accepted its invitation, met Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and in Berlin met Edvard Munch. He left the group in 1907 after a quarrel with Schmidt-Rottluff. In that short time he managed to introduce etching to his colleagues and put them in touch with the Hamburg collector Gustav Schiefler. In 1909 he joined the Berlin Secession, but in 1910, when the jury rejected works by Georg Tappert and many Expressionists, he took part in founding the New Secession. His first religious pictures date from then: “The Last Supper”, “Pentecost” and “The Mocking of Christ”. Success followed: exhibitions in Hamburg, Essen and Hagen in 1910–1912, scenes of Berlin nightlife, theatre sketches, the “Autumn Seas” and the nine-part “The Life of Christ” (1911–1912).

At the Museum of Ethnology in Berlin he made more than 120 drawings of objects from non-European collections. One result was the painting “Man, Woman and Cat” (1912), which reproduces, almost unchanged, the throne of King Njoya of Cameroon. From the autumn of 1913 to August 1914 Nolde took part, as a draughtsman and together with his wife, in the medical and demographic expedition of the Imperial Colonial Office to German New Guinea. The journey ran through Siberia, China and Japan.

In 1916 they moved to the farm of Utenwarf near Tønder. After the partition of Schleswig, Nolde, who thought of himself as a German and belonged to the German-speaking minority, took Danish citizenship and kept it for the rest of his life. When the land around Utenwarf was drained, the couple bought a mound near Neukirchen in 1926 and named it Seebüll. By 1930 a house with a studio had been built there, and a hall for paintings was added later. Beside it Nolde and Ada laid out a garden whose paths follow the shapes of their initials, E and A. In 1927 a jubilee exhibition for his sixtieth birthday was held in Dresden.

From the early 1930s he shared the ideas of National Socialism. In 1934 he joined a North Schleswig National Socialist organisation, which was then absorbed into the Danish section of the Nazi Party. His memoirs, “Das eigene Leben” (1930) and “Jahre der Kämpfe” (1934), contain many racist and antisemitic statements. In 1933 he called Max Pechstein a “Jew” before an official of the Propaganda Ministry and, when Pechstein objected, refused to retract it.

But Hitler rejected Expressionism. In 1937 “The Life of Christ” was shown at the “Degenerate Art” exhibition, and 1,052 works by Nolde were removed from museums, more than by any other artist; some were destroyed. He wrote to Joseph Goebbels, asked for his art to be reassessed, and saw himself as a participant in the struggle for “German” art. His income meanwhile remained high. In August 1941 Nolde was expelled from the Chamber. He did not dare to paint in oil, fearing that the smell of the paints would give him away, and so chose watercolour. Friends sent him his materials.

After 1945 exhibitions and honours returned. Ada died on 2 November 1946; two years later Nolde married Jolanthe Erdmann, the daughter of the composer and pianist Eduard Erdmann. Until 1951 he painted more than a hundred further pictures, and until 1956 many watercolours. He took part in documenta 1 in Kassel in 1955 and received the Pour le Mérite (1952).

Emil Nolde died on 13 April 1956 in Seebüll and was buried in the garden, in a former bunker turned into a crypt, beside Ada. He made the mosaic “Madonna and Child” on its end wall himself. The Ada and Emil Nolde Foundation was established in 1956, and the museum in his house opened in 1957.