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Emil Nolde
Mein Leben [My Life]
Part Two - The Anticlassical Painter.
Part Two - The Anticlassical Painter.
(review by Francesco Mazzaferro)
[Original Version: October 2015 - New Version: April 2019. Please be aware that an important exhibition on the issues discussed in this blog is being held in Berlin between April and September 2019 - "Emil Nolde. A German Legend. The Artist during the Nazi Regime." The exhibition is curated by Bernhard Fulda, Christian Ring and Aya Soika, in cooperation with the Nolde Foundation. The start of the research leading to the current exhibition is mentioned in this post. The current exhibition marks a fundamental change of attitude of the Nolde Foundation compared to the past]
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| Fig. 5) The 2008 edition of the Memoirs (2013 reprint) |
Go Back to Part One
Today,
Nolde's Memoirs are accessible to the
general public through the edition released by the publishing house Dumont in
2008, under the patronage of the Nolde Foundation [1]. We shall not repeat here
what we said in the first part of this essay. It is enough to recall that, in
1976, the four volumes containing the diaries of the artist (last published in
1967 for a total of about 800 pages) were compacted into a single volume, which
did not exceed 450 pages in the latest available version. Beyond typographical
differences, the 2008 edition is, in fact, the result of the choice to shorten
(but also to select and manipulate) Nolde’s writings. Hereafter, for
convenience of the reader, a summary table is displayed that lists and orders
the various versions of the Memoirs proposed
over the years (please see, once again, Part One). Next to each version appears
a code, which is what we will use to refer to specific editions from now on.
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| Fig. 6) Summary Table of All the Editions of Nolde's Memoirs |
That
said, the first question to arise spontaneously is: what impression do first
readers get of the Memoirs today?
The
strongest impression which U/2 gives
to the reader comes from the strong intimate tones and the avoidance of the
great themes of his age. The focus is on the indeed very passionate love for
the wife Ada (the Memoirs end
abruptly with her death in 1946; nothing autobiographic remained about the
following ten years of Nolde’s life, including his second marriage), the
gratitude to the few lifelong friends (like Hans Fehr), the internal ‘struggle’
to search and find sources of inspiration for his own art language (colour,
techniques), the external ‘struggle’ to get the reputation of the public and
convince critics and other painters, the link to his region (Northern
Schleswig) and in particular the passion for rural life in the North, the
formidable interest for nature, the passion for bohemian moments of urban life
in Berlin (dance, theatre), the desire to travel, the interest for primitive
peoples and their art: all this is narrated with great sense of detail in the Memoirs.
If
you consider however that the time covered by the Memoirs includes two world wars, the collapse of the Guillemin
Empire, the crisis of the Weimar Republic, the establishment of a dictatorial
regime like Nazism, the extermination of the Jews and other groups of the
society, the almost complete physical destruction of Germany in 1945, it is
almost puzzling to see how rare are the references in the 450 pages to historic
events of such a deep importance. There are many considerations on the misery
of life and the weaknesses of human beings, but almost no perception of
collective events. There are pages where he expresses personal sadness for the
loss of a few younger colleagues (Franz Marc and August Macke did not survive
the first years of the First World War), but the same words expressing severe
pain would have been most probably used by Nolde if they had passed away
because of a fatal illness or a car accident, and not in the battlefields, in
Verdun and on the Marne respectively.
The
flavour of intimacy of the Memoirs is
even strengthened after reading all first editions of the first and second
volume. 1/1 is expanded by the
painter in 1949, precisely to augment the very extensive collection of intimate
memories in 1/2; the text reductions
in the 1976 and 2008 unified versions aim at significantly shortening just
those additional pages. As to the second volume, something similar applies; in
particular 2/1 and 2/2 (i.e. the 1934 and 1958 editions of
the second volume), are obviously both much larger than the corresponding
material collated in U/2. A large part
of the material of the second volume that disappears in the first transition
from 2/1 to 2/2 and finally from U/1
and U/2 concerns the personal sphere
(religion, feelings, dreams and nightmares, friends, neighbours, pets,
gardening, the description of rich colours of natural environments, which often
originally lasted for pages and pages).
The
absolute centrality of privacy can be interpreted in a benevolent way.
Let us
for a moment make reference to the pictorial production of Nolde: with the exception
of few art pieces – like the paintings “Battlefield”(1913), “Revolution” [Fig. 20] (1917), “Warship and Burning
Steamer” [Fig. 22] (1938-1945) and the “unpainted pictures” entitled “Disputants” and
“Dispute” [Fig. 21], drawn during the Second World War – Nolde did not produce any image celebrating
or criticising secular developments, and also in those cases he never made
precise reference to specific events. All life-long, he remained a poet of
nature, of religious motives, of urban leisure, of travels and primitive
civilisations, of portraits of friends, and of allegories. A sort of a-temporal
painter, all focused on the magic of colours and on the intention to trigger
strong and indeed primal feelings in the spectator, without the need for him to
search for any secondary explanations.
Moreover, along the full course of the Memoirs themselves, Nolde repeats an admonition to himself on a regular basis: “Painter, paint!” (Male, Maler!). This repeated incitement – almost a mantra – might imply that the painter considers his absolute duty (almost a Kantian categorical imperative) to paint, whatever the dramatic developments in the world are. In many respects, Nolde honoured that imperative commitment, when he decided to ignore the prohibition to produce any art work, imposed on him by the Nazi regime, and drew the so-called “Unpainted pictures” (Ungemalte Bilder), small-sized (and amazingly beautiful) watercolours which he designed clandestinely, to imagine the fully-fledged paintings, which he could not perform anymore in his atelier. You might even come to the conclusion that Nolde made everything to avoid that any of the dramatic events of his age (whether wars or totalitarian regimes) would ever produce any damage to the resilience of his creative soul, permitting him to continue producing art according to his own personal pictorial language in the most difficult instances. And his flower paintings shine with colours both in times of peace and war over four decades.
I
will however take a much less benevolent view of Nolde’s Memoirs, basing myself – in particular – on the original version of
the second volume, entitled “Years of Struggle” (Jahre der Kämpfe), which describes events between 1902 and 1913. My
main thesis, as already explained in Part one of this post, is that in December
1934 Nolde wanted to present himself to the German public (which had just voted
in a referendum to provide full powers to Hitler in the summer of the same
years) as the champion of a politically conservative, nationalist-minded type
of modern art, to be established as new contemporary German national art. It
should not be forgotten that in summer of 1934 Nolde had signed with other
German artists (like the orchestra director Wilhelm Furtwängler, the composers
Richard Strauss and Hans Pfitzener, the architect Mies van der Rohe, the
sculptor Ernst Barlach) the manifesto of around forty personalities of
culture, gathered by Josef Goebbels, appealing the German voters to agree via
referendum the incorporation of the powers of President and Chancellor to Adolf
Hitler (the plebiscite took place in August 1934) [4].
In
this respect – this is my thesis – the impression that Nolde wants (or his
heirs wanted) to provide as an ‘a-political’ artist, merely occupied with
colours and with art techniques, is factually wrong. That
impression was however consolidated by the fact that the third volume (3/1, written in 1936 but first published
in 1965) intentionally focused on marginal themes for the German society (in
particular, on travels abroad) and the fourth volume (4/1, published posthumously on the basis of a manuscript finished by
the painter, almost twenty years after it was terminated) was probably drafted
by the Foundation in the after-war time with the intention to ignore the great
themes of contemporary German history.
The
same impression on Nolde as a time-insensitive painter, extraneous to any
secular development, was also strengthened by Hans Fehr (really, his best
long-life friend). Fehr published a Book of the Friendship in 1957, which
included a number of bizarre and highly ambiguous statements by Nolde,
allegedly dating back to 1922 in which the painter first proclaimed himself
uncertain on whether he should give his vote for the extreme right or the extreme
left, and finally concluded that whatever power would be able to establish its
own legal system would legitimate itself, “whether this power is the ruler or
the people, the military or the national-socialists” [5]. These were the years
in which extreme right and left tried to conquer power via coups, and Nolde
seemed ready to justify all of them, whatever their direction, provided order
would be re-established soon. It should be mentioned that Hans Fehr was a law
professor at the University: he must have recognised that these thoughts were
in line with the well-known theories of Carl Schmitt, the German philosopher of
law who legitimised with his law doctrine the violent power-taking by Hitler in
Germany. Obviously, Fehr forgot to mention in his book that Nolde had been part
of Hitler’s electoral campaign in 1934.
A anti-cosmopolitan, anti-classical painter
Emil
Nolde was born as Emil Hansen in Nolde, in North Schleswig, which is today a
region of Denmark and not anymore of Germany’s most northern Land, i.e.
Schleswig-Holstein. He decided to take the surname Nolde at a later stage, in
1902, when he undertook the profession of painter as main professional activity,
after having practiced and taught applied arts in the first 35 years of his
life. The reason he mentions in the Memoirs
for the new surname is that too many people were named Hansen [6], but this was
also a clear sign of how much Nolde was attached to his homeland. Not only his new
surname, but even his own language was marked by geography. In an afterword to
the 1988 edition, Martin Urban signals that Nolde’s writing style in German is characterised
by a syntax marked by strong regional influences, as Nolde himself admits,
telling us that he was never able to properly learn German at school; his
German language style resembled Danish in some aspects (for instance, in the repetitive
use of participle tenses, used to introduced independent sentences like
participle is used for instance in French; in German it does not exist). Born
as a German national, Nolde became Danish citizen in 1920, as a consequence of
the end of the First World War [7]. Ada – the companion of his life – was a
Danish citizen he had met in Copenhagen. This does not mean that the Nolde’s
family was an open-minded multi-cultural environment. Prussia had conquered
Northern-Schleswig with a war in 1865, and Germany lost it with a referendum,
after the First World War. The painter recalls that – at the beginning – his
brother refused to make the acquaintance of his sister-in-law, due to nationalistic
tensions [8]. However, if Nolde felt strongly, all life-long, to be part of a Northern
European and German cultural community (and remained indeed, as we will see
below, very hostile to the classical culture of France and Italy), it is also
because he was permeated by the myths of Scandinavian popular tales of his
infancy, which had led him to a strong emotional proximity with art in Northern
Europe.
If
you had in mind the type of cosmopolite German-speaking intellectual who – in
the first half of the century - contributed through his or her many-sided
culture to the modernisation of global culture worldwide, but succumbed to
German national-socialism (like Thomas Mann or Sigmund Freud or Albert Einstein
or Gustav Mahler or Berthold Brecht or Fritz Lang or Franz Kafka), you could
not be much farthest from Nolde’s world. Nolde claimed he had read to the end
only one single book all his life long (a today rather unknown novel by Victor
von Scheffels, entitled ‘Ekkehard’ [9]), even if critics still dispute whether
this may be true or not. Only in very few cases Nolde reports to have been present
to discussions about art or philosophy, but he also confesses that he felt
incapable to participate to those conversations: “Where should I know from?” (Woher
sollte ich es wissen) [10]. At any case, his friend Paul Klee – once he had
read the first volume of the Memoirs (1/1) - expressed amicably sincere
surprise in October 1931, when he took note that he had managed to conclude the
writing of a good book [11]. Nevertheless, after having read the Memoirs, attempts by also important critics in post-world Germany (like by
Werner Haftmann, the founder of the Documenta
modern art exhibition in Kassel, who published a superb monograph on Nolde in
1958) to treat Nolde as an integral part of pro-European intellectual circles do
not look like very convincing. In another admirable piece – a commemorative
speech held at one hundred year from the birth in 1967 – Walter Jens admitted
that the only way to assess Nolde in a modern way, compatible with Germany
democratic course, was to interpret his painting against any evidence that the
painter provided in his writings: to love Nolde as an artist, despite what Nolde
had written in his Memoirs.
Nolde
deeply disliked France (he spent some unhappy months in Paris among 1899 and
1900), and was really bored by Italy – which he visited 2-3 times, without
however making a grand-tour across our country. He disapproved of any influence
of ‘classical art’ in Germany (including impressionism, as he took a broad
definition of classicism). For instance, he opposed the so-called
neo-impressionism of the Berlin Secession. I tried to list all passages in
which he expressed a firm anti-French feeling, often in contrast to strongly
passionate national tones on Germany: I counted more than twenty times in the U/2 version (the shortest one). Even in
the choice of the frames for his pictures, he made sure he would not take those
used by French painters! [12] I will report one example for all anti-French
passages, which reproduced verbatim the text of a letter of 14 September 1911
[13]. To be noted: it is one of the least radical and most balanced statements
contained in the Memoirs on this
issue, as he also acknowledges the merits of French art. “Our [German] painting of 19th century will not have a great
importance for the future, since it stays almost completely under the shadow of
the old great masters, or is depending on French impressionism. I find gorgeous
that some of the most beautiful paintings of the most significant painters – of
Manet, Degas, Cézanne, Gauguin, van Gogh – have been purchased in Germany. It
is however regrettable that so many works tending to sweetness, of Monet,
Renoir, Sisley and often also Rodin, have come to us. […] The Berlin Secession
has – since its own establishment – always and eagerly stressed, that the great
painters are the French ones, while Secession members are half-great. This is
true. However, this has continuously fed the feeling of dependency, and the
entire offspring of the Berlin Secession has felt into an uncertain waving up
and down, from a great building to another. If our art will be equivalent or
more significant than the French one, that it will be also – even without
wanting it particularly – completely German. In industry, in commerce, in
science and so on we have gradually become not only equivalent, but even
exemplary, and we are self-confident. The same will happen for art; all most
beautiful preconditions are available to the nation.” [14]
His
long-life friend Hans Fehr was deeply shocked – as a Swiss national – that
Nolde had such deep anti-French feelings (and tried, in vain, to convince him
to the contrary of the grandeur of
the French culture). In the Book of Friendship he also wanted to make sure that
readers would know that such feeling were not the result of Nazi propaganda: “Still before the influx (Einströmen) of National-socialists in 1931, he
[Nolde] was expressing himself in strong words: ‘The poor, agonising Germany.
And the Napoleonic power obsession of the French – gold money is amassed in
Paris, the evil power’.” [15]
Visiting
the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, Nolde
expressed his firm desire to escape – as a painter - the path of Albrecht Dürer
and all those German artists who – visiting Italy – had got victim, in his
view, of dependence and imitation (Abhändigkeit
und Nachahmung) [16]. Speaking again on Durer, he writes: “I could not really understand his intention
to include the human body in a scheme which should be an ideal of beauty”
[17].
During
his longest journey to Italy (1904-1905), which had predominantly the purpose
to provide to his wife Ada the possibility to recover from health problems with
a therapeutic stay in Sicily, Nolde explains that he failed to get intrigued in
almost any art piece he saw. Expectations were however quite low, as clarified
when he enters Italy through the Brenner: “Italy,
the country of Germanic nostalgia. Attracting for centuries all Northern and
German (nordisch-deutschen) artists,
until they came back with carbonised wings. Also the strong ones.” [18] And referring to Sicily, he states: “Here everything was foreign to me. I did not
like the landscape, the people, and the ruins” [19]. And finally, when he leaves Italy: “In art terms, the country had not given
anything to me. In no year before I had worked so little and so badly. I could
do nothing of all I wanted, and I was made incapable by the alien nature”
[20]. The only thing he liked – a few
years later – of Italy was the idea of the futurists “to break and burn any Italian old piece of art” [21].
Hans
Fehr, in his Book of the Friendship,
tries to justify this aversion with a physical problem of the friend and
recalls a letter he received from Ada Nolde in 1905, explaining that “My husband’s eyes did not support the strong
light and the reflexes of the white walls” [22]. However, I doubt that
simply owning a good pair of sun glasses would have solved the problem.
One could call Nolde ‘the anti-classical’ painter
by excellence. Indeed, “anti-classical’ should be even a better definition
than ‘expressionist’, a classification in any case he did not agree with. In
2/1 he writes: “Intellectual art literates call
me ‘Expressionist’; I do not like this constriction. A German artist, that's me” [23]. The last part of the sentence (“A German artist, that's me”)
disappeared however in 2/2 in 1958; this shows that this statement was not
considered any more in line with the new European direction of Germany [24]. Commenting
on developments in art history in the last 20-30 years, Nolde wrote in 1912: “We were told that we can admire the most
perfect art with the Greeks, and that Raphael is the greatest of all artists.
(…) Since then, something has changed. We dislike Raphael, and we remain cold
in front of the plastics of the so-called Greek heyday” [25]. The poor
Raphael is only equalled by Tiepolo: “Also
the agility of hand was an enemy, the only one I feared a bit. Tiepolo, the
most agile of all painters, was abominable for me” [26]. And then: “Blessed be our strong, healthy German art
(Gelobet sei unsere starke, gesunde deutsche Kunst). And the holy intimately soulful German Madonnas of a Grünewald and
others; in view of this painter, they were infinitely better than the
Romanesque externally presentable pictures of Raphael, so well fitting with the
milieu of the Doges, and Popes. The whole art of all Mediterranean peoples bear
the same characteristics in itself, which are their own - our German art has its
own, independently. Our tribute to the art of the Latin peoples, to the German
one our love.” [27]. “Let us be proud
and self-confident. Since one or two millenaries we have our own, intimately
beautiful, sour, strong German art. We do not need any loan from any among all
people, whether old or contemporary ones. Self-confidence is a proud virtue,
arrogance a low ethos. This we should also keep in mind” [28] And he
concludes: “People or peoples who are
either satisfied with life or culture tired and complacent have little desires
and they cannot yearn for them. In our German much-vituperated, much-loved
heart, it glimmers and glows, fermenting it forever. Yearning equals to fire
and tears, stepped up to the highest voltage – it is very fertile.” [29] Summing
up, most of similar statements against classical art and in favour of a pure
Nordic Germanic art are contained in the versions 2/1 (1934), 2/2 (1958), 3/1 (1965) and 4/1 (1967), but all
disappear in 1976.
If today I ever met Nolde in a comfortable compartment of a German train, I might argue perhaps that not all Italian religious art is Raphaelesque. Like Dürer and Grünewald produced German art of different orientation to the north of the Alps, also Italian art always showed a variety of accents. Perhaps the Pietà by Cosmè Tura and the Lamentation in front of dead Christ of Niccolò dell'Arca would have convinced him that the greatest artists are universal geniuses, can mediate between different sensibilities and are not prisoners of strict geographical or, even worse, racial definitions.
Finally
I could respectfully object that the young Paul Klee, who visited our country
in 1901-1902 (only a few years before Nolde’s trip to Sicily in 1904-1905), at times wrote similar pages in his Diaries:
he shared the doubts of the Nordic artist on classical and Renaissance art, he
even hated Baroque as a form of degeneration, but discovered and enjoyed urban
architecture and minor arts, the late Antiquity and the middle Ages. In short,
based on his aesthetic preferences, Klee said he preferred Genoa and Naples to
Rome, and chose Santa Sabina against St. Peter's as his favourite Rome church,
but found everywhere the seeds of beauty.
Hans
Fehr refers, to the contrary, in his Book of the Friendship to a conversation
he had with Nolde in 1922, when he proclaimed, almost in a Nietzschean style: “Beauty is dead (…) The man is in fact not a
beautiful creation. His arms and legs swing like sausages around him. I prefer
old statues with chipped arms. Yesterday one of my small timber-figures from
New Guinea felt and broke. It lost one arm. First, I wanted to repair it. But
then I gave up, as the broken figure looked more beautiful to me.” [30]
At
the peak of Nolde’s success, in 1927, one of most important art critics in the
Weimar Republic, Paul Westheim, called Nolde a barbarian.
“This painter – writes Westheim – who can be so graceful and well-tuned in his still lives and flower images as only Manet would have been able to be, is at the same time a barbarian, one of those Nordic barbarians who have incorporated their awful demoniac visions in an Irish ornamental textile. One of the German barbarians – they were called for long time ‘gothic’ in a disdainful meaning – who did not know any measure in their uninhibited creative impulsion, both in the greatness as well as in the scurrility of their creations. The Romanic artist does not have problems to finalise an image, to successfully create harmony; he grows within a well consolidated tradition. Not so the gothic artist, the Nordic and Germanic man, who needs to start always again, and must develop a new artistic language for himself.” [31]
“This painter – writes Westheim – who can be so graceful and well-tuned in his still lives and flower images as only Manet would have been able to be, is at the same time a barbarian, one of those Nordic barbarians who have incorporated their awful demoniac visions in an Irish ornamental textile. One of the German barbarians – they were called for long time ‘gothic’ in a disdainful meaning – who did not know any measure in their uninhibited creative impulsion, both in the greatness as well as in the scurrility of their creations. The Romanic artist does not have problems to finalise an image, to successfully create harmony; he grows within a well consolidated tradition. Not so the gothic artist, the Nordic and Germanic man, who needs to start always again, and must develop a new artistic language for himself.” [31]
In the same year – in a collection of texts (Festschrift) in occasion of his sixty birthday [32] – the painter
Paul Klee, a friend of Nolde, referred to himself as a “very old soul” (Uralte Seele) and “the demon of this
region” (Dämon dieser Region) [33].
Westheim and Klee are right. In many respects, Nolde was indeed a barbarian and a demon, if you define like it an artist who did not accept that any formal aesthetic conventions – inherited from the past – would inhibit him in the search for the primordial search of an emotional language close to ecstasy and rapture, through a maximally excited contrast of colours.
Nolde’s
anti-classicism: pure taste or ideology?
Is the anti-classicism of Emil Nolde a question of taste only, or is
it the result of ideological believes?
Nolde himself explains his views with the conflict of colour of the
North and sun of the South, in a passage contained only in all versions of the
second volume (2/1;
2/2 e 2/3) which preceded the first integrated version of 1976 (U/1): “Sun of the South. Since the
very beginning, flattering us northern people, but taking away from us what we
have most proper: the strong, sour,
intimate. A little bit weak, a little bit sweet, a little bit exterior, and the
artist gets the approval of the entire, great, large world. However, everybody
recognises that anything entirely weak, anything entirely sweet, anything
entirely is ultimately bad. Who from us does not know the Edda [note of the
editor: old Viking poems], the Isenheim Altarpiece [note of the editor: Matthias
Grünewald’s masterpiece], the Faust of Goethe and Zarathustra of Nietzsche,
these stone-carved runes, these proud, supreme works of the Northern and
Germanic people? One must distinguish between eternal values and daily noise.
A young painter prays: "I want so much that my art will be strong, sour
and intimate." [34]
For
Nolde, civilisation seems to be divided in North and South, since centuries. “Between the South and the Nordic-Germanic
mediaeval art there is a clear dividing line. Since the Egyptian and the Greek
art until the Spanish and French one can find [in the South] a magnificently
large, formal beauty, but also in the golden ages are present the germs of
decadence and a somewhat empty pathos. The art of the Nordic-Germanic people is
moved by soul warmth, mystic and phantasy, restrained force and often a warmly
touching modesty. We people of the North can strangely well understand the art
of the Southern people, and the latter can almost never understand ours. It
seems like if this difference is somewhat a natural law, as well as the fact
that Nordic people are always attracted to the South, in direction of the sun.
My paintings, occasionally exhibited in Venice, horrified the Italians and
captured little understanding in Munich: even for inhabitants of Munich they
are too northerners” [35].
So
far, we could speak of anti-classicism as a mere expression of the artist’s
personal taste. However, we should also consider what the US scholar William
Bradley wrote on the relationship between Nolde and the so-called Populist
Movement (Völkische Bewegung), an
artistic and literary stream which attracted great support in Germany between
the end of the XIX Century and the World War II [36]. The author sees Nolde’s
anti-classical thinking as one of the distinguishing consequences of the
influence of that movement. According to the Völkisch theory, nature was the source of art and artists were
fundamentally shaped by their natural landscape: communality of landscape was
creating a shared culture (which they called race). Thus, an artist born in the
Northern German nature had to have a different way of practicing art than any French
or Italian artist. Only artists living in cities – according to this theory -
were exposed to a dangerous levelling pressure of their styles across borders,
which was the result of materialism and speculation. The movement – also spread
in other Nordic countries – interpreted itself as spiritually deriving from
Rembrandt. It had strong nationalistic and populist features (including an
anti-classical prejudice), it was typical of countryside regions of Northern Germany
and contributed to the success of extreme rightists views in Germany’s culture
already ahead of National-Socialism. In substance, I indeed found extensive
parallelism between the contents of Nolde’s Memoirs
and Bradley’s theses, but I failed to find explicit references to specific
Völkisch authors and artists (if not one not particularly significant, which is
however immediately cancelled in 1958 [37]). An interest must have existed. The
biography included in the catalogue of the Frankfurt retrospective exhibition
includes the reference that “in February
1933 he submits an application to become part of the Völkisches Kampfbund für
deutsche Kultur (Militant Popular League for German Culture), but is rejected.”
[38] We know that the League was not simply a Völkisch movement at that time:
it was directed by Alfred Rosenberg, the director of the Volkischer Beobachter, the nazi daily.
Max
Sauerlandt as art critic of Emil Nolde
 |
| Fig. 7) Max Sauerlandt, Emil Nolde, Munich, Kurt Wolff Publishers, 1921 |
If
the emphasis on Germanness is without any doubts the original viewpoint of
Nolde, it is useful to make a short deviation on what Max Sauerlandt, his most
important art critic in the Weimar Republic, wrote on him. This digression
shows that these were themes on which the entire art community reflected in
Germany. Sauerlandt was also museum director; in 1913 he purchased Nolde’s Last supper (fig. 42), the first case of an
important acquisition of a painting of him by a public collection. This
triggered however an important polemic, with complaints by the director of the
National Gallery in Berlin, Wilhelm von Bode and a very punctual and sarcastic
response by Sauerlandt. As from then until his death in 1934, Sauerlandt
followed and supported Nolde for twenty years of pictorial activity.
There
are three reference texts. In 1921 Max Sauerlandt published the first monograph
on Nolde ever, a book of rare elegance (fig. 40). In 1927 he edited and published Nolde’s
correspondence. In 1933 he devoted to Nolde one half of his Lesson on the art
of the last thirty years, a 200-page publication of a series of lessons held
at the University of Hamburg. Finally, in 2013 Heinz Spielmann published
Sauerlandt’s correspondence [39], in which a bit less than 50 pages are devoted
to Nolde’s Last Supper, and the last
100 pages to the disputes within the Nazis which led to his eventual dismissal
from his last (and most important) director position: the art museum of
Hamburg, the Kunsthalle.
In
the 1921 monograph, Sauerlandt does not seem to focus his attention on national
themes. His primary goal is first of all to elucidate such a complex and
divisive artist like Emil Nolde to the German public. For the theatre-like
biblical nature of his figures, Sauerlandt compares Nolde’s religious art to
mediaeval stained-glass windows, to Rembrandt, to the theatre heroes of
Shakespeare, Goethe and Molières [40]. He explains that Nolde should not be
compared to impressionists only, but to painters of much earlier seasons of
visual art, with which he had “secrete, deep elective affinities” [41].
Sauerlandt recognises them in particular in Nolde’s religious art, making of
him an artist participating in the history of all Nordic and Germanic nations,
including England. It is on this basis that years after (we are in 1957) Hans
Fehr, in order to show that Nolde was not nationalist, can quote Max
Sauerlandt, in his Book of the friendship: "Max Sauerlandt (besides Schiefler
and me, without any doubt his best friend) wrote: “His [of Nolde] deepest
essence is the incarnation of internal dramatic tension, still in a monologue,
comparable in the richness of figures and vibrations to the dramatic world of
Shakespeare. And like Shakespeare does not belong only to England, also Nolde
does not belong only to Germany. They both belong to the entire world of the
Germanic souls, which generated them.” [42]
Of
Sauerlandt’s 1933 lesson on modern art exist in reality three versions.
According to Jähner [47], a well-known and esteemed art
historian of the German Democratic Republic, also the Rembrandt edition 1933 did not
correspond in full to the original text of the lessons at the Hamburg
University. The original manuscript by Sauerlandt would mention Nolde as “the great implementer of Nordic art and
therefore an exemplary representative of the constructive will of
national-socialism” [48]. Jähner added that the manuscript contained
several more praises to Adolf Hitler than the one contained in the 1935
publication.
A vigorous
discussion had started in 1933 – within Nazi art circles – on the role of
modern art, with a minority view supporting the merit of considering
expressionism as a pure and revolutionary form of German art. One of the
supporters of the ‘revolutionary’ course – Otto Andrea Schreiber – proclaimed
the death of traditional expressionism and defined Nolde (together with
Feininger and Schmidt-Rottluff) as one of the “Young artists” that
reinterpreted it in line of continuity with past German art [49]. One after the
other the supporters of this view lost ground and were relieved of their
functions. In Sauerlandt’s correspondence one can read how numerous art critics
and directors of museums of modern art were fired by the new regime, although
they personally had great sympathy for Nazism. Some of them even declared they
would accept their unfortunate professional destiny (which they erroneously
interpreted as a misunderstanding, hoping it will be very soon cleared),
provided the ‘young art’ of Nolde would not be sacrificed. Nolde had thus
become the symbol of art renewal for the so-called ‘revolutionary’ wing of Nazi
aesthetics, which was finally liquidated in a famous September 1936 speech by
Adolf Hitler in Nuremberg, who not only condemned any form of modernism (like
cubism, dada and futurism itself) but also every attempt to reinterpret
intimately the past: a “feigned
internalisation of the Gothic does not sit well in the age of steel and iron,
glass and concrete.” [50] Resistance by art critics continued. On 17
November 1936 Joseph Goebbels prohibited art criticism as an autonomous
activity.
If
Nolde became – to the eyes of Sauerlandt and of what will be later on called
‘revolutionary Nazism’ the champion of the new Germanic art (as Nolde had
hoped), it is well known how all of this ended up: The 'revolutionary Nazism'
was swept away and Nolde ended up in the group of so-called degenerated art. Of
course, the version of Sauerlandt’s Lesson
published after the war (1948) did not contain most of the most questionable
passages. The introduction by Harald Busch disappears; he had defined
Sauerlandt (to make him a compliment) as “the
most Nazi in spirit among us art critics”, also in order to proof that it
was not explainable why exactly the Nazis had purged him [51]. The premise,
written at the signature of “an anonymous
listener” of the lecture, is not displayed any more: it explained that the
goal of the lesson was certainly not “an
opposition against the declarations of certain national-socialists”, but
that the mere purpose was that “at least
one competent person would speak” on modern art [52]. The participation of
Sauerlandt as officer fighting in the First World War was not mentioned anymore
[53] and the statement that his ideal of beauty was integrally German and in
perfect line with Nietzsche, was also cancelled [54]. The following passages
disappear in the main text: the reference to the “national movement” and the possibility it would start from there a
new chapter of “New Objectivity” [55]; a compliment to Hitler [56]; the
reference to Hitler as guarantor that all ‘tribes’ (Stämme) of the German people (Volk)
will have their own spiritual and cultural life in the Reich (in the sense that
Prussia and the German South will not prevail on the German North, of which
Nolde is the champion) [57]; a quotation from the above-mentioned famous Nuremberg speech of
Hitler on aesthetics, with an attempt to read it in a pro-Nolde sense [58].
Nevertheless, the editor simply included a note in the 1948 version, which
says: “The text – double checked with the
manuscript – has been reproduced without variations, with some few changes
which are not essential in substance and are time-dependent statements.”
[59]
Today, if one compares
the work of the artist with that of the centuries that preceded him it, it is
perhaps easier to recognize - perhaps in spite of Nolde’s views - elements of
universality in aesthetic language that prevent legitimizing him as an artist
who belongs unilaterally to a single geographic region of Germany or Europe
more generally. Starting from his Last
Supper of 1909 (the one purchased by Sauerlandt) to return to his Emmaus,
1904, one can trace paths that marry his iconography not only with Gothic art
and Rembrandt, but also with the Spanish El Greco and with Goya, and also with Rubens
and Caravaggio. After all, Nolde’s own universal success across all of our
planet’s continents refutes his argument that only those who come from the
North can understand Emil Nolde.
End of Part Two
Go to Part Three
NOTES
[1] The book that I read is a 2013 reprint
of the 2008 edition. For this reason, the notes refer to a volume dated 2013
and not 2008.
[2] Nolde,
Emil – Das Eigene Leben (My Life), Berlin, Rembrandt Publishers, 1931, pp. 204.
Quotation at page 136. Nolde, Emil – Das Eigene Leben (My Life), Flensburg,
Christian Wolff Publishers, without date (1948), pp. 293. Quotation at page
224.
[3] Fehr,
Hans – Emil Nolde. Ein Buch der Freundschaft (A book of friendship), Munich,
Paul List Verlag, 1960, pp. 149. Quotation at page 78.
[4] See
the text by Thomas Knubben “My Suffering, My Torment, My Contempt. Emil Nolde
in the Third Reich” in: Emil Nolde. Unpainted Pictures, Watercolours 1938-1945
from the Collection of the Nolde-Stiftung Seebüll, Hatje Kantz Verlag, 1999,
pp. 150. The text is published at pages 137-149.
[5] Fehr, Hans – Emil Nolde. Ein Buch der
Freundschaft (quoted), p. 53.
[6] Nolde, Emil – Mein Leben (My Life),
Cologne, Edited by Manfred Reuther, DuMont, 2013, p. 455. Quotation at page
p.119.
[7] Nolde, Emil – Mein Leben (My Life), (2013), p. 368.
[8] Nolde, Emil – Mein Leben (My Life), (2013), p. 124.
[9] Nolde, Emil – Mein Leben (My Life), (2013), p. 75.
[10] Nolde, Emil – Mein Leben (My Life), (2013), p. 163.
[11] The
entire text of the letter is published at page 163 of the fourth volume of the Memoirs, in the 1967 edition; in the
abridged and unified version of 1988 reference to it is included only in the
afterwards by Martin Urban at p. 438.
[12] Nolde, Emil – Mein Leben (My Life), (2013), p.232.
[13] Nolde, Emil – Briefe aus den Jahren
1894-1926 (Letters from years 1894-1926), Berlin, Furche Verlag, 1967, pp.183. Quotation at pp.78-79.
[14] Nolde, Emil – Mein Leben (My Life), (2013), p.219.
[15] Fehr, Hans – Emil Nolde. Ein Buch der
Freundschaft (quoted), p. 109.
[16] Nolde, Emil – Mein Leben (My Life), (2013), p.96.
[17] Nolde, Emil – Mein Leben (My Life), (2013), p.204.
[18] Nolde, Emil – Mein Leben (My Life), (2013), p. 143.
[19] Nolde, Emil – Mein Leben (My Life), (2013), p. 145.
[20] Nolde, Emil – Mein Leben (My Life), (2013), p. 147,
[21] Nolde, Emil – Mein Leben (My Life), (2013), p. 201
[22] Fehr, Hans – Emil Nolde. Ein Buch der
Freundschaft (quoted), p. 30
[23] Nolde,
Emil – Jahre der Kämpfe (Years of Struggle), Berlin, Rembrandt Verlag, 1934,
pp. 262. Quotation at page 182.
[24] Nolde, Emil – Jahre der Kämpfe (Years
of Struggle), Flensburg, Christian Wolff Verlag (without indication of date),
pp. 240. Quotation at page 186.
[25] Nolde, Emil – Mein Leben (My Life), (2013), p.225.
[26] Nolde, Emil – Mein Leben (My Life), (2013), p. 249.
[27] This passage can be read at page 174 of 2/1 (the 1934
version of the second volume) and is still included in 2/2 in 1958 (page 178) and 2/3
in 1967 (page 195), but not anymore in the one of 1976 and the following 2008
version.
[28] This passage
is included at page 178 of 2/1 (page
182 of 2/2 and page 198 of 2/3) and
disappears afterwards.
[29] The entire sentence is published at
page 184 of the 2/1 version of 1934
and at pages 189/190 of the 2/2
version of 1958. In the current version (U/2) is instead displayed only the
first part of teh sentence, at page 231.
[30] Fehr, Hans – Emil Nolde.
Ein Buch der Freundschaft (quoted), p. 52.
[31] Westheim
Paul - Hamburger Fremdenblatt, 1927. The phrase appeared in a billboard
displayed in the entrance hall of the retrospective exhibition of Nolde at the
Städel Galery in 2014, without any more precise bibliographic indication. The
exhibition catalogue (note no. 3 on page 32) indicates that also the art
historian Adolf Behne (who was not Nolde’s friend) adopted the same definition
in 1930. See: Adolf Behne: "Ausstellung Emil Nolde," Welt am Abend,
15 February 1930.
[32] Festschrift
für Emil Nolde anlässlich seines 60.Geburtstages (Publication in honour of
Emil Nolde on the occasion dei suoi 60 anni), Dresden, Neue Kunst Fides
Publishers, 1927, pp. 42 and 38 pages of pictures. The statement of Paul Klee,
at that time working at the Bauhaus of Dessau, is at page 26.
[33] In his Diaries (covering the years 1898 to 1918), Paul Klee referred to
Emil Nolde only once, in paragraph 916, expressing a positive opinion on an art
exhibition of him in Munich in 1913 (the passage is confirmed in the critical
edition published by the Klee Foundation in 1988, but strangely not included in
the latest Italian edition published by Ascondita Publishers in 2012). In the
afterword (p. 438), Martin Urban also refers to a letter of congratulations
that Klee sent to Nolde for the first volume of memoirs (U/1) of 25 October 1931. There are 6 references to Klee in the 2008
version U/2. On page 94, Nolde
expresses regret for not having met Klee when they were students at Monaco in
the same years (they had been both rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts, but
attended private courses in the Bavarian capital); on page 201, he mentions him
as one of the protégés of the Berlin art critic Herwarth Walden, the founder of
the magazine and Gallery 'Sturm' (in fact, Walden was cited 14 times by Klee in the Diaries); on page 210, he appreciates Klee’s
art, full of inventiveness and capacity for abstraction from reality; on page
403, he writes that among the abstract artists only Klee defended him; on page
427, he mourns his death before he could be given back the dignity of artist,
after his art had been banned by the Nazis; on page 433, he says that only some
watercolours by Klee were saved from the bombing of his own flat in Berlin, where
his whole collection of contemporary artists had been lost.
[34] This
passage is to be found at p. 175 of the 1934 version. It is also contained in
the 1958 version – page 179 - and in the 1967 one, at page 196.
[35] Nolde,
Emil - Mein Leben (My Life) (2013), p. 402. It must be said that the
relationship between Venice and Nolde was much more complex than what Nolde tells
us in the Memories. Nolde was already
present at the Biennale in 1910, with the drawing "Sailing boat". But
it was in 1928 that Germany had brought sixteen works by Nolde in Venice, with
a solo exhibition dedicated to him. By the way, it is interesting to read what
Paul Ortwin Rave wrote in his "Kunstdiktatur im Dritten Reich" (The
dictatorship of art in the Third Reich, Hamburg, 1949): the preparation of the German
Pavilion at the Biennale was managed alternately by representatives of artistic
circles from the North of Germany (more open-minded) and Bavaria (very
conservative). In 1928, the direction of the German pavilion was up to the
Director General of the Bavarian art collections, and therefore Germany was
preparing to prepare an entirely traditional pavilion. In Italy, however, the
new director of the Biennale, Antonio Maraini wanted "to bind Italian 'avant-garde'
art also to modern art in other countries, which were to be represented by their
most progressive artists. "It was Margherita Sarfatti – an art critic at
the head of the group of 'twentieth century Italian' (Novecento Italiano) artists
and a theorist of modern fascist art - to prepare a wish list of German artists
and to bring it to Berlin: three should have solo exhibitions (Corinth, Nolde
and Marc) and dozens of Vanguard artists (Dix, Beckmann, Kirchner, Hofer, Klee,
Macke, Pechstein, Schmidt Ruttloff, etc.) to be included in the German pavilion.
Ms. Marfatti wrote in her "History of Modern Painting" in 1930:
"Some of the best German today painters are those belonging to the group
The Bridge (Die Brücke): Max
Pechstein, Ernest Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, the painter and
architect Erich Heckel, and Emil Nolde, obsessed with giant figures, grinning for
joy or pain." Nolde was still exposed at the XX Biennale of 1936. On that
occasion, the International Gallery of Modern Art of Venice bought a
"Landscape with flowers and trees" which is still on display in
Venice. Even in Italy, Nolde also had those who loved him.
[36] Bradley, William Steven – The Art of
Emil Nolde in the Context of North German Painting and Volkish Ideology,
Northwestern University, 1981, pp. 317; Bradley, William Steven – Emil Nolde
and German Expressionism. A Prophet in His Own Land, Northwestern University,
1986, pp. 196
[37] At
page 160 of the second volume in its first version of 1934 (2/1); in the
following version (2/2) the reference is cancelled.
[38] Emil Nolde. Retrospective, edited by
Felix Krämer, with articles by Max Hollein, Christian Ring, Aya Soika e
Bernhard Fulda, Munich, Prestel Verlag, 2014, 295 pages. The quotation is at
page 283.
[39] Sauerlandt, Max - Ethos des
Kunsturteils. Korrespondenz 1908-1933 (The ethic of art judgment. Correspondence
1908-1933), edited by Heinz Spielmann – Hamburg, Hoffmann und Campe, 2013, 464
pages.
[40] Sauerlandt, Max – Emil Nolde,
München, Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1921, pp. 89. Quotations at pages 36 e 42.
[41] Sauerlandt, Max – Emil Nolde,
(quoted), p.54.
[42] Fehr, Hans – Emil Nolde. Ein Buch der
Freundschaft (quoted), p. 94
[43] On Julius Meier-Graefe as the German
champion of French Impressionism (and opponent of any nationalist reflex in
German art) see the posts in this blog on Max Klinger, Lovis Corinth and KarlHofer. Meier-Graefe led a fierce attack against the first, just died, in fact
helping to make forget his memory for decades, while appreciated Corinth (who
produced a famous portrait of him) and was the mentor of Hofer.
[44] Sauerlandt, Max – Die Kunst der
letzten 30 Jahre, (The art of the last 30 years) Berlin, Rembrandt-Verlag,
1935, 269 pagine. The quotation is at page 135
[45] Sauerlandt, Max – Die Kunst der
letzten 30 Jahre, (quoted), p.111
[46] Sauerlandt, Max –
Die Kunst der letzten 30 Jahre, Versione del 1935, (quoted), p.138
[47] Jähner, Horst – Künstlergruppe
Brücke. Geschichte einer Gemeinschaft und das Lebenwerk ihrer Repräsentanten
(The Art Group ‘The Bridge’. History of a Community and the Art of their
Members), East Berlin, Henschelverlag, 1984, 463 pages. Quotation at page 413,
notes 309-312.
[48] Jähner, Horst – Künstlergruppe Brücke
(quoted), pagina 413, note 309-312.
[49] The article is integrally quoted in “The
Third Reich Sourcebook (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism) – edited by
Anson Rabinbach and Sander L. Gilman, 2013, University of California Press”,
923 pages. Quotation at page 487.
[50] The Third Reich Sourcebook (quoted),
p.484.
[51] Sauerlandt, Max – Die Kunst der
letzten 30 Jahre, 1935 Version, (quoted), p.5.
[52] Sauerlandt, Max – Die Kunst der
letzten 30 Jahre, 1935 Version, (quoted), p. 8.
[53] Sauerlandt, Max – Die Kunst der
letzten 30 Jahre, 1935 Version, (quoted), p.12.
[54] Sauerlandt, Max – Die Kunst der
letzten 30 Jahre, 1935 Version, (quoted), p.12.
[55] Sauerlandt, Max – Die Kunst der
letzten 30 Jahre, 1935 Version, (quoted), p.21
[56] Sauerlandt, Max – Die Kunst der
letzten 30 Jahre, 1935 Version, (quoted), p.30.
[57] Sauerlandt, Max – Die Kunst der
letzten 30 Jahre, 1935 Version, (quoted), p.146.
[58] Sauerlandt, Max – Die Kunst der
letzten 30 Jahre, 1935 Version, (quoted), p.147.
[59] Sauerlandt, Max – Die Kunst der
letzten 30 Jahre, (The art of the last 30 years), Hamburg, Hermann Laatzen
Verlag, 1948, 183 pages plus 61 pages of black and white pictures. The
quotation is at page 177.
[60] Sauerlandt, Max – Die Kunst der
letzten 30 Jahre. 1948 Version (quoted), p. 61
[61] Sauerlandt, Max – Die Kunst der
letzten 30 Jahre, 1935 Version, (quoted), p.78.
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