Emil Nolde valuation
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.
What a work by Emil Nolde is worth
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Bio
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.
At a glance
- Born
- 7 August 1867, Burkal Parish
- Died
- 13 April 1956, Seebüll
- Movement
- Expressionism
More on Wikipedia.
The Nazi years, and the Unpainted Pictures
Nolde supported the Nazi party from the early 1920s and held antisemitic views, yet the regime condemned his work and removed 1,052 of his works from German museums, more than for any other artist. The exhibition Emil Nolde – A German Legend at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin in 2019, drawing on the Nolde Foundation's archive, set out that history in detail.
The small watercolours he called the Unpainted Pictures, made during the war years, are a distinct group. For any Nolde the Seebüll foundation's opinion is the reference, and provenance through the 1930s, when so much was taken from museums, should be traced carefully.
St Gallen, the Schiefler catalogue and restitution
Nolde trained as a woodcarver and illustrator in Flensburg from 1884 to 1891 and worked in furniture factories before teaching drawing at the museum school in St Gallen from 1892 to 1898. Turned down by the Munich academy in 1898, he took private classes and spent time in Paris, and he was 31 before he painted full time. In 1902 he married the Danish actress Ada Vilstrup and moved to Berlin, where the collector Gustav Schiefler and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff became early supporters.
Schiefler's catalogue of the prints records 231 etchings, 197 woodcuts, 83 lithographs and four hectographs, and the woodcut The Prophet, of 1912, is the best known. The Unpainted Pictures number some 1,300 watercolours on Japan paper. After the war he received the Pour le Mérite, and the Seebüll foundation opened its museum in 1957. Restitution claims have followed: in 2007 the Swedish government ruled that Moderna Museet must settle with the heirs of Otto Nathan Deutsch over Blumengarten (Utenwarf), and in 2015 the Lentos museum in Linz returned Maiwiese to the heirs of Otto Siegfried Julius.
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