Emil Nolde - Nadja , 1919

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EMIL NOLDE
Nadja , 1919.

Oil on canvas

Object description

Nadja . 1919.
Oil on canvas.
Urban 830. Signed lower center. Signed and titled "Nadja" on the stretcher. 40 x 25 cm (15.7 x 9.8 in)
"1919 Nadja" listed in Nolde's own painting catalog from 1930.

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

PROVENANCE: Private collection Dr. Ernst Rathenau, Berlin.
Lost from 1977/79.
2006 after rediscovery, restitution to the heirs of Dr. Ernst Rathenaus.

EXHIBITION: Modern German Art from Berlin Private Ownership, National Gallery, Berlin 1928, Cat.No. 150.

LITERATURE: Search advertisement due to the theft in: Weltkunst, vol. 49, no. 21 p. 2828 (with ill.).
About Dr. Ernst Rathenaus as an art collector see: Friedemann Berger, in: Die Schaffenden, Leipzig and Weimar 1984, p. 30.

CONDITION: In good condition. Canvas trimmed on the left and just mounted on the stretcher.

"Nadja" - the moving history of an image

1919 Emil Nolde paints "Nadja". Nolde himself erroneously states "Dr. Walther Rathenau, Berlin" as the first owner in the list of his paintings from 1930 on page 30.

Since the 1920s "Nadja" has been owned by Dr. Ernst Rathenau, renowned art publisher and collector who lived in Berlin-Charlottenburg until 1938.

1928 "Nadja" is exhibited in public for the first and only time: In the exhibition of the Berlin National Gallery "Newer German Art from Berlin Private Ownership". The owner is stated as "Dr. Ernst Rathenau, Berlin-Charlottenburg".

1938-1944Dr. Rathenau has to emigrate to the USA and leave "Nadja" behind in Berlin. His secretary saved the picture from being seized by the National Socialists and deposited it in a safe at the Merck Fink & Co bank in Berlin. "Nadja" miraculously survives the bombing of the city and also escapes confiscation by the Red Army.

After 1945 Dr. Rathenau often returns to Germany and then lives in Bad Nauheim, among other places, in Hilbert's Park Hotel, where he dies on January 24th, 1986.
"Nadja" is stored at a shipping company in Freiburg im Breisgau.

Between October 1977 and September 1979 "Nadja" got lost in an unexplained manner from a storage cabin of the shipping company.

1979After noticing the loss, Dr. Rathenau posted a search advertisement in the specialist journal "Weltkunst".

1990 Prof. Dr. Martin Urban compiles the catalog raisonné of Emil Nolde's paintings and records "Nadja" under no. 830 and states the whereabouts of "unknown".

Summer 2006 An unnamed art collector discovers "Nadja" in the attic after the death of his daughter, who probably played a role in the disappearance of the work. He hands over the portrait of "Nadja" to the police through an intermediary. Two investigators from the LKA Baden-Württemberg let Dr. Manfred Reuther, Director of the Seebüll Ada and Emil Nolde Foundation, confirm.

April 2007Ketterer Kunst is supported by the representative of the heirs of Dr. Ernst Rathenau commissioned with the auction of "Nadja".

Emil Nolde

Emil Nolde first studied from 1898 at Adolf Hölzel's private painting school in Dachau and from 1899 at the Académie Julian in Paris. By dealing with Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch and James Ensor, Nolde came to an independent style from 1905 in which color played an essential role. In 1906, during a stay on the island of Alsen, the artist met the "Brücke" painters, whose group he temporarily joined. Nolde turned to the watercolor technique, made his first attempts in 1909 on non-absorbent paper and came up with pioneering innovations. From an expedition to New Guinea in 1913 he brought back a wealth of study material, which he processed in numerous works.

Nolde paints the impressive female portrait "Nadja" in one of his most productive and important creative years, in which some of his most important works, including many portraits, were created. His portraits, especially those painted around 1919, can be seen with their exaggerated expression in the series of large-format watercolors that he created during his voyage to the South Seas. Nolde found a generous, free style in which the exotic and the expressive form a formal unit. In our case, it is the expressive colors that are supported in their effect by a clear picture composition. The detail of the composition underlines a dynamic that is given by the expressive color. An impasto application of paint that can develop in a concentrated manner in island-like areas of color, shapes the expression of this portrait in an inimitable way. In its concentration on a few and yet significant components, our portrait can be highlighted and appropriately appreciated in the extensive oeuvre of the painter as a special masterpiece of his portrait art.

Nolde's diaries also contain nothing about the person portrayed. She possibly comes from the artistic milieu of Berlin, to which Emil Nolde's wife Ada was originally connected.

In 1928 Nolde settled in Seebüll. Ostracized by the National Socialists, Nolde began painting his "Unpainted Pictures" from 1938, many hundreds of small watercolors, which he took up again in oil paintings after 1945. The painter died on April 13, 1956 in Seebüll. [KD]


Break with tradition - the portrait in modern art

In the portrait painting of the classical modern age, parallel to the stylistic diversity, very different approaches are pursued. Nolde's portrait "Nadja" in its radical view, which has been reduced to the essentials, illustrates the break with traditional portrait painting. Nolde did not look for portraits in Nadja. With him, the color takes on an image-defining function and becomes a vehicle for expression. Such contrasting painters as Henri Matisse or Alexej von Jawlensky can be named here as well as the painters of the Dresden artist community "Die Brücke", to which Nolde also belongs at times. In contrast to Nolde, the "Brücke" painters are concerned with a supra-individual representation of people in their living environment and less with a psychological interpretation. Emil Nolde's "Nadja"

"Nadja" - erotic game with the viewer

In his paintings Emil Nolde repeatedly deals with the erotic attraction of women. However, he seldom portrays the subject in such a multi-layered manner as in the present work. "Nadja" is ostensibly only completely turned towards herself and yet at the same time sends the viewer diverse and ambiguous signals. The bright red and slightly parted lips, the large eyes, the reddened cheeks, the suggestion of the neck and the bare shoulder and, last but not least, the long parted hair are set pieces of erotic promises that are not kept. Rather, "Nadja" turns away from the viewer in her beauty, looks inward and withdraws from the other. This tension of closeness and distance, of addressing and turning away, makes the portrait "Nadja"


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