Frenzied, nightmarish art from a card-carrying Nazi
Is it possible to separate Emil Nolde’s work from his vile beliefs? Alastair Sooke visits a new retrospective
Emil Nolde (1867-1956), the German Expressionist who is the subject of a historic new exhibition of more than 120 artworks at the National Gallery of Ireland, is an easy figure to loathe – chiefly because, during the Thirties, he was a cardcarrying Nazi, whose anti-semitism is evident in the monstrous hook-nosed characters that appear in his paintings.
Despite trying to curry favour with senior party apparatchiks such as Goebbels, however, Nolde was singled out by the Nazis as a modernist proponent of “degenerate art”. In 1941, he was even banned from being a painter. Of course, this does not exonerate him from his abhorrent views – and, for many people, knowledge of Nolde’s Nazi sympathies will forever tarnish his art.
Yet Nolde produced his most memorable work long before the Nazis came to power. For instance, he’s the man responsible for that icon of Expressionism, Prophet (1912), a woodcut depicting a craggy, sombre face, all skull and scraggly beard, seemingly agonised by dreadful wisdom, emerging from darkness like some gloomy primeval spirit. And it is this earlier corpus of paintings and works on paper – characterised by fiery hues, intense emotion, and shocking eroticism – that merits the retrospective treatment.
The son of a German-frisian farmer, Nolde worked as a furniture woodcarver before becoming an artist. A silvery view of a canal in Copenhagen from 1902 provides evidence of early competence, but zero sense of the chromatic fireworks to come.
In the first decade of the 20th century, his style changed radically, as he began a lifelong love affair with vivid colours, often deployed in jarring contrasts. Like many modern artists, he was not interested in depicting nature faithfully. Rather, he wished to express the full, roiling force of his inner passions and visions. His art can be difficult to stomach; Nolde himself spoke of striving for “crude” paintings that could never hang in “perfumed salons”. “Metropolis”, the second of five rooms in the exhibition, which is arranged thematically, offers a snapshot of him operating at the height of his artistic powers.
Consider Cabaret Audience, an oil painting from 1911. Here we are in a Berlin nightclub. A woman in a blue dress – a singer? – looks like the hagridden bride of Munch’s Scream.a smartly dressed audience gazes on, their faces distorted to the point of caricature. All have the bilious yellow skin of Lego figurines – a Nolde trope. This is, then, no vision of innocent nocturnal pleasures, but a sulphurous, swirling nightmare that threatens to tip over into delirium.
In the next room, demented horror runs free. A forbidding, impenetrable phalanx of purple-faced soldiers oppressively fills the entire width of one composition: a harbinger of the First World War. Throughout, a ghastly sense of cancerous corruption gnawing away at the heart of modern life, is memorably expressed.
The only respite comes in the final room, which showcases Nolde’s tranquil paintings of sunlit gardens. A large, sensuous close-up of bright red poppies, from 1942, is welcome after all the mayhem and menace elsewhere. Though even here, it is impossible to look at Blonde Girls (1918), an almost Sargent-like vision of two blue-eyed, golden-haired sisters, without seeing the malignant seeds of Nazi Aryanism.
Where, then, does Nolde stand in the pantheon of modern art? There is no question that he is a shouty presence, who cannot be ignored. At the same time, his provocations in oils are sometimes strained: on occasion, the frenzy feels forced. He is also guilty of producing duds: Portrait of a Gentleman (1915) and Blue Day by the Sea (1940), for instance, are poor paintings.
Moreover, in terms of subject matter, Nolde was generally a follower, not an innovator. His paintings of Berlin’s nightlife owe an obvious debt to Degas and Toulouse-lautrec; a suite of paintings inspired by a trip to German New Guinea in 1913-14 is unthinkable without the precedent of Gauguin in the South Seas.
Ultimately I suspect Nolde would fare better in a group show, with his peers from the radical Dresden-based association Die Brücke (“The Bridge”), of which he was a member in 1906-07. This way, he would be represented only by his strongest works. It might also make it possible to separate art from artist. For us to see that, despite any loathing we might feel toward Nolde himself, the art he produced expresses the values of forceful, non-conformist creativity – just the sort of thing the Nazis despised.