Fulfilling Fear

In 1933, the aging Emil Nolde became the only major German expressionist to join the Nazi Party. Much good it did him. For all his Frisian peasant conservatism, the Nazis soon called him a "degenerate" modern artist and stripped his works from German museums. In 1941, he was forbidden to sell his art or even to paint. At 73, Nolde retreated from Berlin to his summer home in Seebull, not far from his birthplace on the North Sea coast--but he did not stop painting. To his diary he revealed: "I still hold my head high, and only to you, my little pictures, do I sometimes confide my grief, my torment, my contempt."

Actually, his lot was not terribly tormented. Lifelong friends looked after him, and local merchants accepted paintings in exchange for food. Recalls Andreas Hansen, then (as now) mayor of tiny Neukirchen and the ranking local Nazi: "Every week my wife and I visited the Noldes and we chatted. This was my inspection. I knew that he painted, but I kept my eyes closed."

Nonetheless, Nolde lived in fear--fear of Allied bombers, fear of hidden microphones in his studio and informers among his guests. Because he feared the telltale stench of turpentine, he gave up oils and instead painted some 1,300 watercolors on small (5-in. to 10-in.) pieces of Japanese rice paper that could easily be hidden. His wife Ada would press them flat with her iron before he hid them away in his huge "treasure chest." He called them "unpainted pictures" because he hoped some day to use them as bases for oil paintings.

Trolls & Hobgoblins. Only a small proportion of Nolde's watercolors had been translated to oil before his death in 1956 at the age of 88, and the rest form a self-sustaining cycle. Some 54 of the watercolors are currently on display at Manhattan's Knoedler gallery (see color opposite). In contrast to Nolde's earlier works, which stress religious subjects or Berlin's raucous cabarets, this rural cycle focuses on ordinary workaday existence, together with a few of the Nordic trolls and hobgoblins native to Schleswig-Holstein. Most of the pictures show pairs and groups of everyday people. Their dress is shapeless, timeless. The light is eerie. Sometimes Nolde painted the flat Schleswig countryside and the powerful sea that lurks just beyond its dikes in turbulent colors reminiscent of England's J.M.W. Turner. More often, he portrayed the country life around him: a patriarch with his clan, a farm girl with windswept hair.

To Emil Nolde, though, a subject was to a painter "as the instrument he handles is to the musician." He said that "colors are my notes, which I use to form harmonizing or contrasting sounds and chords." He usually began a watercolor by working paint onto a wet piece of paper with a bit of cotton until the colors blended into one another. After the colors dried, he would study the composition to see what unexpected subjects it suggested to him, then outline them, a practice he referred to as "passive painting." Nolde said that "my best pictures always came as a surprise," and the biggest surprise was the pleasure that he got from self-exile. His very fears seemed to make him all the more creative. On Dec. 2, 1941, he wrote: "Presently I live with my work in a non-selling situation. It is an impractical but wonderful condition, which I would like to be in all my life."

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