Whe head of a sleeping monster is the Bulbjerg on Jammer Bay in northern Jutland. The 47 meter high Kalkberg is Denmark’s only bird rock, so that the screaming of countless kittiwakes fills the air, eider ducks and cormorants also breed here. The north German painter Emil Nolde (1867–1956) invented completely different Bulbjerg residents for his painting “Before Sunrise”. The only thing the fantasy creatures have in common with birds is their ability to fly – otherwise the four-legged friends wear greenish fur and pointed devil ears.
It is true that Nolde had given free rein to his artistic imagination earlier and turned mountain peaks into giants with a paintbrush. But here, in the Danish town of Lild Strand on the Skagerrak, something new began for him in the late summer of 1901. The creatures that now moved into his art did not come from mythology or the world of fairy tales – but from his own inner depth. With “Before Sunrise” Nolde wrote that he had taken the first step “in the great life of an artist”.
Nolde’s early work in dialogue with Scandinavian art
With the exhibition “Nolde and the North” from October 16, the Bucerius Kunst Forum will follow these beginnings, which not only shaped the landscape of Denmark, but also the country’s artists. “It is the time in which he discovers and looks and learns and finds himself,” says forum chief Kathrin Baumstark.
In cooperation with the Nolde Foundation Seebüll, the show examines for the first time ever the expressionist’s early work in dialogue with Scandinavian art. Around 80 works by Nolde are juxtaposed with 25 paintings by Danish artists, including Vilhelm Hammershøi and Peder Severin Krøyer. The exhibition was curated by Magdalena Moeller, the former director of the Brücke-Museum Berlin.
At the age of 30, the trained wood sculptor Nolde embarked on a career as a freelance artist. Between 1898 and 1901 he sporadically attended various private art schools in Munich, Paris and Copenhagen and continued his self-taught education at the same time. The show looks at each of the three stations. It accompanies Nolde’s path from an initially darkened color to the typical, luminous coloring and deals in four chapters with his first major topics: the images of people, the fantastic, the interior and the landscape.
A momentous experience for Nolde was the visit to the World Exhibition in Paris in 1900, where Danish art was prominently represented. The Danes had been inspired by the French Impressionists, but had gone their own way. “The development of realism, naturalism, plein airism and finally symbolism reflects the Danish variant of European modernism, whereby the establishment of national identity was always of great importance,” explains Moeller. “That means that the Nordic light was used again and again to intensify the image message.” In the course of his artistic development, the native North German Emil Nolde also appropriated this light.
Filled with impressions in Paris, the painter traveled to Copenhagen, where he reworked the pictures he had made so far – for example the work “Milk Girl”, the motif of which can be seen in three versions. In the Danish capital, Nolde attended the art school of the painter Kristian Zahrtmann, known for his unrestricted use of color, who influenced his color development. A mountain landscape by Zahrtmann corresponds to Nolde’s oil painting “Glowing Evening Sky” from 1945, a masterpiece of powerful colors.
Emil Nolde painted “Milk Girl” in 1909; it is owned by the Nolde Foundation Seebüll
Source: Nolde Foundation Seebüll
With reference to the future of the painter, the exhibition also addresses Nolde’s National Socialist sentiments – which, however, never found expression in his work. Although Nolde’s art was defamed as “degenerate” under the Nazis, although he had to endure repression by the regime, he remained a Hitler admirer and a member of the NSDAP until 1945. In the accompanying catalog, the question is discussed, among other things, of whether Nolde took up certain topics from his early work, for example from Nordic history and legends, in the 1930s in order to present himself to the party as conforming to the system. “We want to discuss Nolde’s relationship to National Socialism. A differentiated view is very important, ”says Baumstark.
Regardless of later reinterpretations, Nolde’s early pictures from the motif complex of the fantastic developed in Denmark express for him inner strength and freedom. “In the evenings in the small room I sat scribbling and drawing until past midnight, robbers and robber’s rooms, sandpipers, wild people, night walkers, sun worshipers and I no longer know what the invented names were,” Nolde writes about the time in Lild Beach, a place with only eleven households.
In North Jutland, however, Nolde not only created wild fantasy scenes, but also light-flooded interiors. Important suggestions came from the interior painter Anna Ancher from Skagen, whose use of light falling from the side found many imitators. Nolde’s painting “Spring in the Room” shows clear parallels to Ancher’s “Sewing Fisherman’s Daughter”.
“Without Ada he would not have become Emil Nolde”
The enigmatic, atmospherically concentrated interior designs by the symbolist Vilhelm Hammershøi and the figure paintings by the genre painter Viggo Johansen also impressed Nolde so much that he visited both of them in their Copenhagen studios. Johansen, like Ancher, belonged to the Skagen artists’ colony, which had developed since 1875. For the Skagen painters, not only was the northern Danish landscape worthy of a picture, but also the life of the farmers and fishermen. Nolde also strived to integrate his characters authentically into their surroundings: When he painted the daughter of his landlord for “Girls in the Kitchen”, she had to swap her Sunday wardrobe for everyday dress.
Because Nolde was looking for peace and solitude, he did not travel to Skagen. Instead, he was drawn to small fishing villages in the Baltic Sea, where he painted his first sea pictures in delicate colors. In one of the coastal towns he met the Danish actress Ada Vilstrup, whom he married in 1902. “Without Ada,” says Baumstark, “he would not have become Emil Nolde. It strengthened him. ”A masterpiece of harmony is the oil painting“ Two on the Beach ”, inspired by Peder Krøyer’s“ Skagens Südstrand ”. A couple walks in a deep embrace along the sea, the flowing brushstroke lets man and woman as well as man and nature melt together.
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