Emil nolde

Emil Nolde (7 August 1867 in Burkal - 15 April 1956 in Seebüll, Nordfriesland) was one of the foremost German expressionist painters. His real name was Hans Emil Hansen. He was greatly influenced by Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch, and James Ensor.

He was a declared anti-Semite —he denounced the supposed “Jewish dominance in all the arts”— and was a member of the Nazi Party —in 1933 he was Himmler's guest of honor—, although his work was included in the art exhibition degenerate staged by the Nazis in Munich in 1937—but not on the 1939 all-German tour.

Biography

Hans Emil Hansen changed his name to his hometown (Nolde von Buhrkall), now Burkal, a border town that was then part of Germany, in land Northern Schleswig-Holstein, but which is now, after a referendum held in 1920, part of Denmark. After this Nolde received and always maintained her Danish nationality, although culturally she was German. From a peasant family, she worked as an apprentice in a furniture factory while studying at night at the Karlsruhe School of Arts and Crafts. After touring several cities and carrying out various jobs, his training and artistic interest led him to become an art teacher in St. Gallen (Switzerland) in 1892. Six years later he moved to Munich where he studied at various institutions, intensely committed to dedicating himself to his art career. painter.

In 1899 he moved to Paris and studied at the Julian Academy.

She would later end up moving to Copenhagen, near her home region. In the Danish capital he married Ada Vistrup in 1902.

Characteristics of his painting

Some of the characteristics of Nolde's painting are his strong chromaticism and the simplicity of the works, without great details and with faces that look more like masks than portraits when dealing with the human figure. Sometimes he also opts for monochrome works and the general transmission of his works with human presence does not seek the reflection of virtues or beauty, but rather the opposite.

As a watercolourist, he is considered a virtuoso of the technique.

Artistic conflicts

Emil Nolde had an open conflict with the impressionist painter Max Liebermann, directly responsible for his exclusion in an important exhibition of the Berlin Secession.

He was a member of the expressionist group Die Brücke, although he soon left it due to differences with the rest of the group's members, much younger than him.

Closeness to Nazism

To the left of this image of the 1937 "Degenerate Art" exhibition being visited by the Nazi Joseph Goebbels (with gabardina) we can see two works by Emil Nolde: Christ and the sinner (Christus und die Sünderin) and Young lists and fools(Die klugen und die törichten Jungfrauen)

Due to his anti-Semitism and ideology close to Nazism, after Hitler came to power he had no problem continuing to work, but his works were classified as degenerate art. «Nolde wanted to be a great artist of the [Nazi] regime, but in Nazism there were radically opposed visions about his creation. For some he was the pioneer of the new German art that was going to replace French impressionism, the creator of a new introspection embedded in the Gothic and Nordic tradition. But for the most reactionary his art, especially his religious paintings, was a symbol of degeneration. The latter ended up being imposed, despite which Nolde would always be a Nazi.

His works were included in the exhibition on degenerate art put on by the Nazis in Munich in 1937, but Nolde managed to have them removed from the traveling exhibition that toured all of Germany two years later. However, in 1941, in the middle of the Second World War —which Nolde called the war of the Jews—, the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts expelled him from its ranks, so that from then on he could not exhibit or sell their paintings.

At the end of World War II, he presented himself as a victim of Nazi reprisals and after his death in 1956 the Nolde Foundation helped build that idealized image by publishing the painter's memoirs, from which anti-Semitic passages were excluded. An exhibition held in Berlin in 2019 he recovered his anti-Semitism and his Nazism. As a result, German Chancellor Angela Merkel returned the two Nolde paintings that decorated the chancellery building.

Work in museums (selection)

His work can be found in many museums, among themː

• Nolde-Stieftung Seebull, Seebull
• Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid
• Kunsthalle of Hamburg, Hamburg
• Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf
• Atkins Museum, Kansas City
• Albertina Museum, Vienna