Emil Nolde - Dampfer auf See, ca.1938

 


Emil Nolde 

Dampfer auf See, ca.1938


Object description
Steamer at sea . Before 1938.
Watercolor.
On Japan. 22.8 x 27.2 cm (8.9 x 10.7 in), the full sheet. [SM].

With a photo expertise from Dr. Manfred Reuther, Seebüll Ada and Emil Nolde Foundation, dated February 12, 2013.

PROVENANCE: Private collection, Northern Germany.

EXHIBITION: Watercolors from Bielefeld's private collection, Städtisches Kunsthaus Bielefeld 1967, cat.-no. 12th

Emil Hansen was born on August 7, 1867 in the German-Danish border region. He later adopted the name of his hometown Nolde as his stage name. After an apprenticeship as a furniture draftsman and wood carver in Flensburg from 1884 to 1888, he worked for various furniture factories in Munich, Karlsruhe and Berlin. In 1892 Emil Nolde received a position as a teacher for commercial drawing at the trade museum in St. Gallen, which he held until 1898. In those places where primarily landscape watercolors and drawings by mountain farmers were created, Nolde became known for his small colored drawings of the Swiss mountains. With the decision to become a painter, Nolde finally goes to Munich, but the academy under Franz von Stuck rejects him. This was followed by studies at Adolf Hölzel's private painting school in Dachau and, from 1899, at the Académie Julian in Paris. In 1900 he rents a studio in Copenhagen and in 1903 moves to the island of Alsen. By dealing with the neo-impressionists Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch and James Ensor, Nolde moved from his initially romantic naturalism to an independent style in which color played an essential role. color-intensive, luminous flower pictures are created. In 1906, during a stay in Alsen, Nolde met the "Brücke" painters, whose group he temporarily joined. In a series of portrait studies, he began to turn to watercolors. When Nolde made his first attempts at this technique in 1909 on non-absorbent paper, leaving the sheet white in large parts and dispensing with contouring in the object detection, these innovations were forward-looking. In 1910 Emil Nolde was excluded from the "Berliner Sezession" after a controversy with Max Liebermann and founded the "Neue Sezession" with other rejected artists, in whose exhibitions he participated until 1912. Fascinated less by Berlin city life, which he captures in a few expressive pictures, than by primitivism, Nolde paints still lifes with exotic figures and masked pictures. From an expedition to New Guinea in 1913 he brought with him a wealth of study material, which he processed in numerous works until 1915. From 1916 he spent the summer on the island of Föhr and settled in Seebüll in 1928. The garden created there becomes an inexhaustible source of inspiration for his painting, coastal landscapes and religious scenes also become main subjects.

Emil Nolde often made his strongest statement in the small-format watercolors. The density of the composition, in which sea and sky seem to merge, is only accentuated in the small boats, which stand out in dark blue against the glowing red background. Here, too, Nolde remains true to his once-found composition scheme, which is entirely determined by the expressiveness of the colors. The lost to the elements was one of the great pictorial themes of the artist, who, living on the North Sea, gained a new, completely unknown side with his sensual splendor of colors. Nolde's technique of wet-on-wet painting also benefits this small composition, which is unparalleled in the freshness of its colors.

In the last years of his life, he mainly created watercolors with flower and landscape motifs from the vicinity of his house in Seebüll, where Nolde died on April 13, 1956.

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