Emil Nolde

Emil Nolde: The Nazi the Nazis Banned

After 1941 the German state forbade Emil Nolde to paint — not to exhibit, not to sell, but to paint at all, even alone in his own house. He responded by producing roughly 1,300 small watercolours on absorbent Japanese paper, worked in secret, which he called the *Ungemalte Bilder* — the Unpainted Pictures. It is one of the great acts of artistic defiance of the twentieth century, and for decades it was told as a story of resistance. It was nothing of the kind. Nolde had joined the Nazi Party through its Danish section in the early 1920s, held antisemitic views, and spent the Third Reich petitioning its officials to recognise him as the movement's true German painter. He was banned by a regime he supported.

A Farm in Schleswig

He was born Hans Emil Hansen on 7 August 1867 near the village of Nolde — now part of Burkal in Southern Jutland, Denmark, then in the Prussian Duchy of Schleswig. His parents were devout Protestants of Danish and Frisian peasant stock, and he grew up on their farm with three brothers, conscious early that he was unsuited to agricultural work. The Bible he read as a child and the flat, storm-scoured landscape he grew up in would supply nearly all his subject matter for sixty years.

His training was artisanal, not academic. From 1884 to 1891 he studied woodcarving and illustration in Flensburg and worked in furniture factories. In 1889 he gained entry to the School of Applied Arts in Karlsruhe. From 1892 to 1898 he taught drawing at the Museum of Industrial and Applied Arts in St. Gallen, Switzerland. In 1898 the Munich Academy of Fine Arts rejected him. He spent the next four years in private painting classes, visiting Paris and absorbing the Impressionists, and did not arrive as an artist until he was well into his thirties.

In 1902 he married the Danish actress Ada Vilstrup, moved to Berlin, and took his professional name from the village he was born beside.

Die Brucke and the Break

In 1906 the Dresden expressionists of Die Brücke invited him to join. He accepted, and left at the end of 1907 — a membership of roughly a year that nonetheless shaped everything after it. He belonged to the Berlin Secession from 1908 to 1910 and was then thrown out following a disagreement with its leadership. In 1912 he exhibited with Kandinsky's Der Blaue Reiter and had finally become famous enough to live on sales.

He was among the first Expressionists and one of the earliest painters of the century to treat colour as the primary carrier of meaning rather than the servant of drawing. His palette ran to golden yellows and deep reds, luminous against sombre grounds; his subjects were violent skies over the North German coast, blazing flower gardens indebted to van Gogh, and scenes from Berlin nightlife and theatre. He was also an extraordinarily productive printmaker, leaving 231 etchings, 197 woodcuts, 83 lithographs and four hectographs, often in colour. The 1912 woodcut *The Prophet* — a gaunt, black-gouged face — has been called an icon of twentieth-century art. Among his paintings, *Lesende junge Frau* (1906), *Blumengarten (ohne Figur)* (1908) and *Blumen und Wolken* (1933) are landmarks of the form.

Christ and the South Seas

Religious painting made up a relatively small part of his output but marked the milestones in it. Between 1900 and 1904 he could not separate himself from Millet and Daumier. In 1906 he broke through, abandoning Impressionist habits for flat, two-dimensional composition and violently bright colour applied to sacred subjects. A near-fatal poisoning in 1909 intensified his religious devotion, and after 1911 the work grew darker and more ominous. His nine-part *The Life of Christ* unsettled even his wife: "For the first few days I was only able to take a furtive peek now and then," Ada wrote in February 1912, "so strong was the effect."

He also made over 120 drawings from the ethnographic collections of Berlin's Völkerkundemuseum before travelling with the German New Guinea Expedition, producing a celebrated series from the South Seas and passing through Moscow, Siberia, Korea, Japan and China. The journey confirmed a belief he already held: that the truest art was pre-modern, instinctive, and racially rooted.

The Party and the Purge

That belief carried him directly into National Socialism. He joined the Nazi Party through its Danish section in the early 1920s, expressed antisemitic views about Jewish artists, and argued that Expressionism was a distinctively Germanic style — a position shared, at least for a time, by Joseph Goebbels and Fritz Hippler.

It did not save him. Hitler's cultural policy condemned modernism outright, and no artist suffered more from it than Nolde: roughly 1,052 of his works were stripped from German museums, and several were hung in the 1937 *Entartete Kunst* exhibition in Munich, the state's showcase of art it deemed degenerate. He protested. He appealed personally to Gauleiter Baldur von Schirach in Vienna. In 1941 the ban on painting followed.

So he painted anyway, in miniature, in watercolour, on paper that could be hidden. "There is silver blue, sky blue and thunder blue," he wrote in 1942. "Every color holds within it a soul, which makes me happy or repels me, and which acts as a stimulus."

Why Emil Is Called a Genius

Nolde's gift was chromatic, and it was close to unrivalled in his generation. He could set a bruised violet against an acid yellow and produce not discord but atmospheric pressure — skies that feel like weather rather than depictions of weather. In watercolour, technically the least forgiving medium, he worked wet into wet on absorbent paper where nothing can be corrected and every edge is decided in a second, and he did it at a level almost nobody has matched. That is not a metaphor for intelligence; it is a form of it. Colour relationships are a real problem space, and Nolde solved problems in it that trained academicians could not, having been rejected by the Munich Academy and educated instead in furniture factories.

The woodcuts make the same case in reverse. *The Prophet* achieves in black and white, through gouged wood, the emotional violence he elsewhere obtained from pigment — evidence that the faculty was structural, not merely a good eye for pretty hues.

The counter-case is not aesthetic but moral, and it is severe. Nolde's colour theory and his politics grew from the same root: a conviction that authentic art issued from blood, soil and race. He was not a great artist who happened to hold vile opinions; the opinions were downstream of the same mystical primitivism that produced the paintings. And his intellectual judgement was catastrophic — he spent years trying to persuade a regime that despised his work that he was its rightful painter, and denounced non-Jewish rivals as Jews to advance himself. If genius means a comprehensive quality of mind, Nolde does not qualify. If it means an isolated, freakish capability in one narrow channel, he plainly does. Both things are true, and neither cancels the other.

Legacy

After 1945 the honours arrived, including the *Pour le Mérite*, and the Unpainted Pictures were absorbed into a comforting national story about art surviving tyranny. He died at Seebüll, now part of Neukirchen in Nordfriesland, on 13 April 1956. That story held for six decades. In 2019 the Berlin National Gallery mounted *Emil Nolde: A German Legend, The Artist during the Nazi Regime*, which documented how thoroughly postwar historians had minimised his commitment to the party and forced a reassessment that is now standard in the scholarship. The paintings remain among the most physically beautiful objects the twentieth century produced. Germany has spent the years since working out how to look at them honestly.