Emil Nolde - Marschlandschaft, ca. 1935

 

Emil Nolde 

Marschlandschaft, ca. 1935

Aquarell

Object description

Marshland . Around 1935.
Watercolor.
Barely legible signed lower right. On fine Japan. 25 x 14.7 cm (9.8 x 5.7 in), the full sheet. [CH].

• Refined connection between delicate drawing and two-dimensional, expressive play of colors.
• Atmospheric sky composition of fire red and night blue.
• Extraordinary format .

With a written confirmation from Prof. Dr. Martin Urban, then director of the Seebüll Ada and Emil Nolde Foundation, dated September 8, 1990 (copy). The work is registered in the archive of the Seebüll Ada and Emil Nolde Foundation.

PROVENANCE: Private collection South Germany.

essay

As early as 1916, the Nolde couple moved from the island of Alsen to the sea around Utenwarf on the Ruttebüller Tief. About ten years later they settled down nearby, in Seebüll, in the almost deserted expanse of the Gotteskoog, the largest Koog in the North Friesland district. For the artist, this piece of earth remains a place of retreat and a source of inspiration for the rest of his life. He likes the seclusion, the lashing wind, the roaring, often wild sea, the distant horizon, the cool, Nordic lighting conditions, the very special, rough nature of the flat marshland "with the high, eventful vault of sky, where water, land and light to find oneself again and again to a grandiose unity, with the mighty cloud formations and the glowing orgies of colors of the sunsets "(Prof. Manfred Reuther, in: exhib.-cat. Emil Nolde. In Glut und Farbe, Vienna 2014, p. 126). All of this inspires him and offers him the ideal conditions for his art. He writes: "Our landscape is modest, far from anything intoxicating and exuberant, [..] but it gives the intimate observer an infinite amount of quiet, intimate beauty, of austere size and stormy, wild life for his love for it." (Nolde, in: Reisen, Ächtung, Befreiung, p. 9). In addition to a few paintings, numerous masterful watercolors were created during these years, in which Nolde was able to demonstrate his ability to paint wet-on-wet, which he had perfected over the years. In long, tiring hikes, he captures the surrounding landscape in pure, unbroken and strong colors, skilfully leaving the color surfaces in flowing transitions, but also with the inclusion of the controlled chance on the paper run into each other. "With a fully soaked, heavy brush and in quick, almost organically safe processes" the dramatic cloud formations arise immediately and "virtuoso from the color." (In Embers and Color, p. 129). The watercolor offered here knows how to visualize Nolde's very own, masterful technique in an exemplary manner and impresses with its almost abstract-looking play of particularly bright, intense colors. Only later does the artist then place the delicate line structure on the horizon line.

"I painted what appeared in front of my papers and linen," writes the artist, "the clouds, the waves, a dune fantasy [...]. I saw the excited and wild beauty that lets her fingers of fire drag across the arch of heaven in the evenings last hovering strip of cloud, fading in blazing, glowing color change. I felt the sultriness of the hour, I felt it like embers and sparks, painting, painting with lifelike, most obedient sensitivity, like obeying orders received. " (Emil Nolde, in: Reisen, Ächtung, Befreiung, p. 104). However, nature is only to be understood as a source of inspiration and inspiration, not as a dictation directed at the artist. He explains: "Nature, if he guides it, can be a wonderful helper for the artist;

From the late 1930s, in particular, the couple lived in Seebüll rather withdrawn, completely to themselves and focused on Emil Nolde's painting. Despite Nolde's membership in the National Socialist Working Group in North Schleswig, a total of over 1100 works by Emil Nolde were confiscated from German museums by 1937 and some of them were publicly defamed in the "Degenerate Art" exhibition. From around 1933 onwards, Nolde devoted himself more and more to depictions of landscapes and flowers, as well as images of dunes and the sea. In 1935, the year the work offered here was created, the artist was struggling with serious cancer, which, however, could not have diminished his creativity and his enormous artistic drive. Only a little before, during the presentation of some sketches and drafts, he confessed to a journalist for a Berlin newspaper: "I would like to live another fifty years to be able to paint all these pictures". The passion of the virtuoso watercolorist at the time is still clearly noticeable today in the work shown here with its charming, unusual format and its high-contrast, bright colors. [CH]