Emil Nolde
German Expressionist of burning skies and watercolour flowers, with a biography that has been reassessed.
Emil Nolde was born Emil Hansen at Nolde in North Schleswig in 1867, trained as a woodcarver, and took the name of his village. He was briefly a member of Die Brucke, painted religious subjects that scandalised the church, joined a New Guinea expedition in 1913, and made a body of intensely coloured landscapes, seas and flower gardens. More than a thousand of his works were confiscated as degenerate and he was forbidden to paint, but the long-standing account of him as a straightforward victim has been substantially revised by research into his own committed National Socialist politics. He died in 1956.
The watercolours are the largest and most frequently traded part of the work — flowers, faces and seas painted wet on absorbent Japan paper so the colour bleeds and pools, in a technique that is very difficult to imitate convincingly and very easy to damage. They are extremely light-sensitive and fade irreversibly. The Ada und Emil Nolde Stiftung at Seebull holds the archive and is the authenticating body. There is also a substantial graphic output of etchings, woodcuts and lithographs. Provenance across the 1933 to 1945 period requires care.
If you own a work by Emil Nolde
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