EMIL NOLDE (1867-1956)

Portrat einer Frau mit geschlossenen Augen

  • 1920/25
  • watercolor on thin drawing paper
  • 18.5 x 13.8 inches
  • signed 'lower left

PROVENANCE:
Private collection North Germany, later South Germany

EXHIBITION:
Galerie Commeter, Hamburg, 1926 (purchased by the family of the previous owner from the gallery in 1926)
In 1902 Emil Nolde married Ada Vilstup, a Danish theatre student who was the daughter of a pastor in Jutland. She was Nolde's muse, remaining his emotional mainstay and close companion for the rest of her life.
The subject of this watercolor, painted by the artist ca 1920/25, is a woman, portrayed in profile, who, the viewer may conclude, was Ada Nolde. The previous owner's father bought the work at the Galerie Commeter in Hamburg in 1926. On visiting this family at their home, Nolde saw the portrait and spoke 'of my Ada.' Since, for conservation reasons, the watercolor only hung until ca 1933, the brilliant colors are in their original state.

Sommerblumen-1953

  • 1953
  • Watercolor and tempera on Japan paper
  • 13 x 18 inches
  • signed 'Nolde' bottom left

PROVENANCE:
Private Collection, North Rhine-Westphalia

Nolde has built up the representation entirely from color; line plays virtually no role in this portrait. It is the uninhibited flow of color glowing with vitality and devoid of calculated effect which has so aptly caught the artist's feelings for this woman. With consummate virtuosity he makes almost pure color sing, achieving an unsurpassable intensity.
This rapturous yet dreamy portrait reveals the visionary powers of an ardent nature striving to translate mood into art. In this sense Nolde was a Great Romantic, virtually untouched by the realities of life, as this painterly tribute so eloquently shows.

Emil Hansen was born near the German-Danish border on August 7th 1867. He adopted the name of his birth town as his artist name at a later date. Nolde completed his apprenticeship as a furniture designer and wood carver in Flensburg between 1884 and 1888, and then worked for various furniture factories in Munich, Karlsruhe and Berlin. He was employed as a teacher of industrial drawing at the Gewerbermuseum (Industrial Museum) in St. Gallen in 1892. He continued teaching in St. Gallen until 1898, a period during which he became an enthusiastic mountain climber. Postcards with his images of the Swiss Alps were printed in large editions and were a lucrative source of income. Nolde finally moved to Munich after deciding to become a painter. He joined Adolph Holzel in Dachau in 1899 to become his pupil, studied independently at the Munich Pinakothek and went to Paris in 1900 to increase his knowledge at the Académie Julian. Nolde studied the Neo-Impressionists Vincent Van Gogh, Edvard Munch, and James Ensor, which, around 1905, gradually led him away from his early Romantic Naturalism and to the discovery of his own style with a strong emphasis on color. A primeval, eruptive urge of expression determined his use of color, which ignores any formal criteria. In the following years he intensified his colors to an utmost brilliance in his colorful and glowing flower pictures.

During a sojourn in Alsen in 1906 Nolde met the painters of 'Die Brucke,' a group he joined briefly in the same year. A series of portrait studies marks the artist's discovery of the watercolor. Nolde's first attempts in 1909 at painting in this technique on non-absorbent paper, leaving large areas of paper uncovered became increasingly important in the artist's work in 1918, but Nolde also continued in painting and graphic art. His graphic oeuvre includes not only lithographs and engravings, but, above all numerous woodcuts. Defamed during the war, and banned from exhibiting his works since 1941, Nolde spent the years 1939 to 1945 in Seebull painting his 'unpainted paintings,' more than 1000 small watercolors. His expressive, flat compositions and his powerful color-intensive style considerably influenced German Expressionism.