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Emil Nolde
Mein Leben [My Life]
Part One -
Part One -
Emil Nolde and his Memoirs, between Real Facts and Literary Myths.
[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]
Nolde was supported by a group of critics and directors of modern art museums, but, in reality, he represented only a small minority in Nazi artistic circles, although several prominent figures in the party hierarchy (Goebbels, Goering, Himmler and Speer) secretly had sympathy for him. He also had powerful enemies, especially Alfred Rosenberg, who was convinced that any form of modern art outside of nineteenth-century classical schemes should be prohibited. And, ultimately, Adolf Hitler (painter of very traditional stamp in his previous life) lined up in favour of the traditionalist view on art, condemning Nolde.
The Memoirs after the war
It
is obvious that the very nature of Nolde’s paintings helped them to propose the
German artist to the public in this way. His art was based - both in terms of
artistic composition and reception by the public - on instinct, and not on
rationality. Nolde produced art in a state of ecstasy, almost out of any
planned and intentional process, as if he were in a hypnotic state. Therefore,
it was difficult to rationalize his art, and to consider it in relation to
historical events. With very few exceptions (four or five paintings) his vast
artistic production (more than 1,000 pictures) did not have any relationship
with historical events. His focus was either on nature or religious themes or mundane
events. Viewers are still overwhelmed today by what is often described as an
orgy of colours inspired by a seemingly rule-free use of materials and
techniques. All of these features, usually, were and are not directly
associated by the public with the idea of a totalitarian regime. Nolde’s art can
therefore be interpreted in any direction and according to any historical
coordinates.
What
Lenz did was to take all the key themes of the life and aesthetics of Nolde -
as they were perceived by the public at the time - and to amplify and enhance
their features. If Nolde was known as an artist persecuted for exclusively
artistic reasons, here Nansen proved to be able to act decisively and to accept
risks to his life, in order to preserve the broader values of freedom. If Nolde was generally described as a painter whose creation
process was so dominated by the instinct to be almost devoid of rationality,
here Nansen was certainly a passionate creator of art, but was also able to use
painting to reinterpret - completely intentionally - the reality according to his
own independent taste. If Nolde, in the 1967 version of the fourth book told
that he had exchanged letters with the soldiers during the war to raise their
morale, Nansen took the additional step of curing and hosting a deserter (an
act that he might have paid with life, if discovered). If one could possibly
suspect that Nolde was - even marginally - more involved in the regime than he
wrote in the Memoirs, Nansen had
become, without doubt, a champion of democracy. A pacifist partisan.
How to avoid that ancient doubts would come out again? One of the preferred ways to avoid raising embarrassing questions was to confront both West German and international public with writings of the same authors, indefinitely repeated. A search on www.worldcat.org reveals that Martin Urban, the director of the Foundation 1962-1992, produced 46 different writings on Nolde during his tenure, including some important works (such as a catalogue raisonné of oil paintings in two volumes, unfortunately out of commerce since time and available on the antiquarian market at absolutely prohibitive prices) but also a monotonous list of inputs for exhibitions in Germany and elsewhere. In addition, publications and exhibitions were repeatedly produced on specific and completely apolitical topics, like watercolours and prints, engravings, painting on flowers, depictions of the sea, the oil paintings on religious themes, flowers and animals, portraits, Berlin nightlife, etc. The champion of this technique seems to have been Manfred Reuther, who succeeded Martin Urban in 1992 as director of the Foundation and for twenty years followed this policy, signing 31 volumes, catalogues and articles marked by the clear prevalence of images on script. When in 2012 Reuther retired, the Foundation had edited and published - on behalf of its two last directors – something less than eighty writings, which all track the same profile of the painter. The commercial intent, aimed at a lay audience, is very clear. An embarrassing legacy.
Apollonio, Umbro - Die Brücke e la cultura dell'espressionismo (The Bridge and the culture of expressionism), Venice, Alfieri, 1952
(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. 1) Emil Nolde, 1948. Photo: Paul Senn; © Stiftung FFV, Bern |
Introduction
With
the Memoirs of Emil Nolde
(1867-1956), entitled My Life (Mein Leben)
and published in four volumes and different versions between 1931 and 1967, we
are confronted with one of the most important autobiographical works of the history
of German art literature, but also with one of the most intricate cases of the
history of art literature ever. Anyone who reads the edition currently available
in German bookshops, i.e. that of 2008 (re-published in 2013), is in fact misled
on purpose. The picture that emerges from a reading of 456 pages is, in fact,
incomplete and perhaps historically questionable, making it necessary - in my
opinion – to claim for the publication of a comprehensive critical edition with
commentary, in occasion of the next 150 year anniversary (2017). Let us face
it: many of the aspects of complexity - we shall see - are entirely
intentional, and arise from the will of the painter himself and that of his
heirs, mainly the Nolde Foundation in the German town of Seebüll, at the border
with Denmark. The text of the Memoirs
swelled up to four volumes and 880 pages in 1967 (despite the non-publication
of the fifth volume of aphorisms, planned but never materialized), and was
reduced to 420 pages in a smaller and merged version which was released in 1976.
The difference, I assure you, does not only depend on different fonts and page
sizes.
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| Fig. 2) The 1927 exhibition on Emil Nolde at the Folkwang Museum of Essen, in occasion of his 60th birthday, with the laudatio of the director Ernst Gosebruch |
In
fact, the painter, who had a long life, used his Memoirs to offer a changing and different image of himself,
reacting to the events of history: after the first experiences of extreme
poverty in Wilhelmine Germany, when he developed a completely new painting
style in the name of a north-European-and-German style that rejected any
classical or French influence, he achieved great success in the 1920s, when he
became the most famous artist in the German Weimar Republic. At the height of
his success in 1927 he was defined as 'non-European, German’ (uneuropäisch, deutsch) by the critic and
friend Ernst Gosebruch; in the 1930s, he searched for an even bolder success, proposing
himself at the head of the art of Nazi Germany, but, to his surprise, he
instead suffered the Nazi ostracism as a so-called ‘degenerate’ painter, and was
sanctioned by the requisition of all the artworks and the absolute prohibition to
paint; in the 1940s he first tried to prove to the authorities that this
was a misunderstanding, but it was in vain, as he was even prohibited to
purchase oil colours and to paint privately, for his own pleasure. He violated
however the ban, producing the ‘unpainted pictures’ with watercolours. Finally,
he finally survived World War II and started rewriting the Memoirs, benefiting from his new reputation as a victim of Nazism.
He died very old at the age of 89 years. The Foundation Seebüll – which he
created - did everything to preserve that image of victim of totalitarianism,
even at the cost of questionable editorial operations, even many years after
the end of the war. While the publication of the unpublished part of the Memoirs was intentionally delayed, Nolde’s
critical image was in the meantime reconstructed as the champion of a modern,
avant-garde pictorial culture in Germany, open to influences from France,
integrated in German Expressionism, symbol of internal resistance to Nazism and
predictive of post-war American art. Only Walter Jens, in a speech to mark the
centenary of 1967, put radically in doubt the new clichés, even if he confirmed
his admiration for the artist.
This
continuous series of turnarounds resulted in the multiplication of different
versions of the Memoirs. First of
all, it must be clarified that, historically, four volumes of Nolde’s memoirs were
published. It is also likely that the artist thought of a fifth volume, this
time of aphorisms. However, what is astonishing is the number of different editions
with which every single title has been republished from time to time. We try to
follow the line of each of them, not to nit-picking, but - as we will see -
because each edition has different motivations, determined by diverse
historical moments.
There
were two editions of the first volume, entitled Das eigene Leben (My Life): the second version of 1949 is one third
larger than the original of 1931. Thus, just after the Second World War, the 80-year old author still wanted to expand his narration of his youth years and
the earliest decades of his artistic career, which dated back to the previous
century. There were also two editions of the second volume (called Jahre der Kämpfe, Years of struggles),
roughly equal in size, one in 1934 and the second in 1958, two years after the
painter's death. In the latter case, as we shall see, the posthumous text was
cleansed of the most obvious (but still not of all) nationalist and
anti-Semites references. But it was
during the unification of the text of the four volumes in 1976, justified by
the need to integrate the Memoirs in a single tome, as explained below, that whole
chapters and important steps disappeared, substantially changing Nolde’s
historical image.
Telling
the details of the birth of the third and fourth volumes is even more complex.
We know that a version of the third volume (Welt
und Heimat, or "World and homeland") was ready to be printed, as it
had been completed as early as 1936; however, the publication had been banned
by the Nazi authorities. A few typewritten copies had been distributed to
friends by Nolde in 1941-1942: they were immediately intercepted and seized by
the Gestapo. Important German historians referred, in their writings of the early
post-war period, about the existence of two manuscripts (or type-written
documents) that they had been able to consult in those months at Nolde’s home.
Those documents surely covered the substance of the third volume. In the summer
of 1958, the forthcoming publication of the third volume in the fall was also announced,
in Frankfurt. Then everything was blocked, and the third volume would appear
only in 1965.
The
fourth volume (Reisen, Ächtung und
Befreiung or "Travel, proscription and liberation") was published
in 1967, on the occasion of the centenary of his birth. According to the most
recent biographer of Nolde, Kirsten Jüngling, work on it was started in 1936
and the materials had been collected by the painter in 1948, although it is far
from certain that they were ready to be printed. It is quite certain, however, that Nolde
wanted to publish it with a shorter title ("Travel and
proscription"). With ‘proscription’, he meant here his fate of innocent
victim of the Nazi banning. In fact, not more than two pages are dedicated to
the liberation by British troops. It is indeed unclear, therefore, whether
there was a real original will of Nolde to make of the 'liberation' one of the central
themes of the book.
The
aphorisms that were due to provide the material for the fifth book really
existed and in 1963 the art critic Werner Haftmann gave us a description, publishing
a small part of them. Most of them had been written in the years of the Second
World War. It is hard to understand why they have never been published by the
Nolde Foundation, who oversaw publications and exhibitions on almost any other
issue. Their publication would have allowed us, perhaps, to better understand
what the artist was thinking at such a crucial stage of his country’s history.
What has been hidden?
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| Fig. 3) A series of editions of Nolde’s Memoirs from 1931 to 2008 |
In conclusion, if you consult the latest edition of the Memoirs, that of 2008/2013, the problem is not only the total lack of a critical edition, but also of a clear warning to the reader, on this multiplicity of versions and on their reasons, if not very hastily in a very ambiguous afterword by the long-time director of the Foundation, Martin Urban. What I just mentioned can only be verified if one purchases all editions on the antiquarian market and compares therefore several thousand pages.
And
I would have never come to the idea of doing it, if I had not read a series
of articles on the German press, starting from the one of Jochen Hieber in
April 2014, and the catalogue of the exhibition on Nolde at the Städel Gallery in
Frankfurt in the same year. Those articles and the catalogue of the exhibition had
the merit of spreading among the general public the same doubts that a large
group of young historians and art critics had already manifested in the last
decade, with a thorough research work that debunked stereotypes and even
challenged, for some years, the Nolde Foundation. This post, which was supposed
to be finished in a few weeks in the late spring of 2014, has therefore become
a much larger text, and has covered nearly a year of research and reading. To
document through the sources of art history what has happened, I first wanted
to re-read the most recent version of the Memoirs
in the light of this literature, comparing it with the previously issued versions.
The next step was to tackle the novel German Lesson by the late Siegfried Lenz, one of the masterpieces of modern literature of Germany, published in
1968, which is inspired by Nolde and that implicitly transformed into one of the mythical heroes
of the internal German resistance. Finally, I decided I had to widen the
analysis, and consult a wider range of sources. So I found out that not only
the diaries of Nolde, but also some of the main critical texts about him,
before and after World War II, had been amended: the most important case is the
Lesson on the art of the last thirty
years by Max Sauerlandt, praising him as the prince painter of Nazi art in
the book’s version of the thirties. The book was immediately seized by the
Nazis and finally re-released in a new posthumous version after the war,
without any ideological reference.
The
result is a compelling story - almost a novel – on the manipulation of the
autobiographical account of the greatest German painter of the 1900s.
From 1931 to the end of the Second World War
In
1931, Emil Nolde - at the time the most successful painter of the Weimar
Republic, as already mentioned - published the first volume of his Memoirs. The second volume was released
in 1934. Both were published by the publisher Rembrandt in Berlin, specialised
in history of contemporary art. In a nutshell, we will demonstrate that every
aspect of the second volume of Memoirs - title, time, content - was related to
Nolde’s attempt to take the lead of a new national German modern art, deprived
of any influence of French culture but also of any classical and Renaissance
inspirations, in the name of an art of exclusive Nordic inspiration. In other
words, Nolde tried to present himself as the leader of a new modern art, in the
new Nazi Germany, a few months after the assumption of full powers by Adolf
Hitler.
If
Nolde was already a famous (and rich) painter, he sought something more, as he
had still unrealised ambitions from the past. In the 1910s he had repeatedly tried to take
a leading role in German modern art (at that time everybody spoke of 'young
art') at the time of Expressionism, but he had failed. At the age of 67, a last
chance emerged to eventually establish himself as the founder of a genuinely
new German art.
To
legitimize this attempt, Nolde fixed some cornerstones in his Memoirs: he took distance from any form
of expressionism; claimed the value of the racial theory of art; declared to be
the heir of the German Gothic (Grunewald) against its Renaissance distortions
(Dürer) and the successor of Nordic painting of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries against Impressionism; moreover, he stated that artistic creation was
conceived by him in the tradition of an irrational romanticism, refusing any
aspect of western aesthetic rationalism; finally, he promoted his interest in
nature and landscape as a result of his exclusive relationship of belonging to the
Nordic region and the German nation.
Nolde was supported by a group of critics and directors of modern art museums, but, in reality, he represented only a small minority in Nazi artistic circles, although several prominent figures in the party hierarchy (Goebbels, Goering, Himmler and Speer) secretly had sympathy for him. He also had powerful enemies, especially Alfred Rosenberg, who was convinced that any form of modern art outside of nineteenth-century classical schemes should be prohibited. And, ultimately, Adolf Hitler (painter of very traditional stamp in his previous life) lined up in favour of the traditionalist view on art, condemning Nolde.
In
1934 Nolde knew very well that a lot was at stake: he could establish himself as
the new reference German painter or could be wiped out. He knew he was at the
centre of a dispute within the National Socialist Party and that things could
go very well or very badly. Waiting for events to develop, he therefore chose
to keep a lower profile, and in the third volume of Memoirs prepared a detailed report of his past travel experiences in
the South Sees and the summers spent painting landscapes in the extreme north
of Germany, almost neglecting the tumultuous events of those years, including
the devastating consequences of the defeat in the First World War.
For
Nolde things did not run as he hoped. In 1937 he was even included - to his
surprise - in the group of artists whom the regime stigmatised as
"Degenerate Art". Nolde - now seventy years old - was very embittered.
The third volume - which was ready for publication – could not be printed
anymore. He privately produced fifty copies of a typescript that he distributed
as a gift to friends in 1941-1942, but was discovered by the authorities due to
a lapse of his wife and all copies were immediately seized. His wife Ada was
interrogated by the Gestapo and Emil feared for her. He managed nevertheless to
prove that the text was harmless for the regime. Nolde still continued to work on
the Memoirs, and prepared all
materials for a fourth volume. He was deeply convinced that the prohibition of
his painting (and of his memoirs) was the result of the incompetence and lack
of understanding by some stupid public official, and that he would ultimately
be able to convince the regime of the ideological merits of his deeply German art
(and therefore of the publication of his autobiography): eventually, he tried,
in vain, to do so in 1942, even traveling in time of war to Vienna to meet
Baldur von Schirach, the former leader of the Young Nazis (Reichsjugendführer), which seemed more open to his art. There is
ample historical evidence that he and his wife – they were a very united couple
- continued to be convinced, even if misunderstood, supporters of Nazism until
the end of the war.
After
the war was lost, one of Nolde’s first concerns was to make sure his artistic
legacy would not be dispersed. In 1946, he created with his wife (who died in
that year) the Ada and Emil Nolde
Foundation (hereinafter called Nolde
Foundation), in order to preserve his artistic legacy. We will see that
this was a critical step for the future management of the Memoirs. At the same time, there was the need to amend the text of
the Memoirs. In the immediate post-war
period, a revised version of the first volume was released by the publisher
Wolff in Flensburg (in northern Germany). It was however the least embarrassing
text (not only because it presented the biography of the artist until 1902, but
also because it had been drafted in 1931, i.e. before the seizure of power by
Hitler). There was no indication of date for this new edition, but the new version should be of 1949. To follow the complex history of the Memoirs is, however, also in this case,
interesting: the painter had been impeded to express himself for more than ten
years, and therefore he tried to catch up by increasing the size of the volume by
one third. The editions of 1931 and 1949 are very similar in fonts: the first
one, however, had only 204 pages and 42 illustrations, included in the text;
the second one is enriched, reaching 294 pages of text and 126 illustrations,
excluded from the text. The additional
content, in the 1949 edition, is strongly intimate. One can draw two
conclusions: first, at the end of the war Nolde intended to increase, rather
than reduce, the size of the autobiographical; second, he had at his disposal
many materials (like the early drawings from the youth time) that were
evidently not all lost during the war. In reality, together with the house in the Northern German village
There
are indications that - in parallel to the new edition of the first volume -
Nolde also prepared a new version of the second volume (on the years 1902 to
1913), the one where he had tried to profile himself as the national hero of
German art against the French influence. And in fact, the Spiegel announced, on
Feb. 19, 1949, that the publication of a new version of the second volume was
forthcoming. And here the serious problems begin, because it was already said
that this tome (in the 1934 version) originally contained the policy statements
designed to convince the Nazis that he was the true champion of German painting;
meanwhile Nolde also kept in the drawer - ready for publication - the third
volume (on the years 1913 to 1914) and completed in 1948 the manuscript of the
fourth volume (covering the years between the First and Second World War).
In
the early fifties, thus, everything was ready to present to the public a complete
autobiographical account. However, the announcement of the Spiegel was
contradicted by facts: the amended version of the first volume did not
materialise for nine years. The revised version of the second volume was
published by Wolff Publishers, again, without any indication of date (that's strange!). Some historians say that it was 1958, others mention even 1965.
Kirsten Jüngling, the latest biographer of Nolde, prefers not to take a firm
view, and says only that it was printed after the death of Nolde. I think it was
1958. The third and fourth volumes were published by Wolff in 1965 and 1967.
Also in 1967, the Cologne publisher DuMont began to release a new version of
the Memoirs. It was no coincidence: it was an important year, the centenary of
Nolde’s birth. The total amount of the four books in the 1967 edition by DuMont
reached, as already mentioned, 880 pages. It is a considerable autobiographical
body, one of the largest in the history of art literature.
Why
did the Memoirs of Nolde remain
unpublished between 1949 and the period between 1958 and 1967, after the artist
had rushed to complete the manuscripts and to amend those already published
immediately after the war had ended? Why did those released anew to the public
after the war still contain embarrassing pages of nationalistic taste on Noldes’
ideological and aesthetic beliefs, which were then amended only in 1976? Why have
some autobiographical documents (i.e. the aphorisms) never been published,
except in small part? And then, why did the letters after 1926 have never been
published? Why did editors continue to change the text of the Memoirs without notifying the reader, if
not in an afterword in 1976 that does not clarify anything?
Let
us be malicious, for once, and ask really mean questions: are there reasons why
only a dozen photographs in the long life of such a famous artist have been
published? Did he never want to be pictured? Were all pictures and lettes lost during war
time in the bombing of the Berlin flat? Or do pictures display him with the button of the National Socialist
Party? And what it is the reason for which the Memoirs were the subject of a so impressive number of new versions,
to the point that they have become itself a bestseller, without any single scientific
publication having been dedicated to them, with the one exception only of the
volume "Nolde in dialogue" (Nolde
im Dialog), published in 2003 as a catalogue to an exhibition in Karlsruhe
in 2002, which however focuses again only on the years between 1905 to 1913? Is
it possible that none has ever asked himself any of these questions at the
Nolde Foundation? In the absence of a critical edition of the Memoirs themselves, an answer can only
be made in highly hypothetical terms.
The
difference between the quite substantial amplification of the first volume and the
very light touch-up contained in the new edition of the second volume gives the
impression that the now elderly Nolde wanted to complete the preparation of his
Memoirs, but felt necessary to maintain a degree of continuity with the
ideas advocated in 1930: he wanted to continue proclaiming the Germanness of his
art, defining aesthetic values which would be different from the rest of
Europe, and opposing any influence on German art from France and Italy. He did
not feel the need to re-discuss basically his identity. Moreover, it would have
been difficult for any octogenarian to ever do it. Probably, he was still a
convinced Nazi after the war, as it was the case, by the way, of his wife (who
passed away in 1946; he will marry two years after a much younger woman). Not
coincidentally the same Ernst Gosebruch who had called him "non-European, German"
in the 1927 laudatory speech for his sixty birthday, still repeated the same term
in his speech in 1947 for the eighty years: in his view, Nolde had stood up as
a hero to avoid that German art would lose its right to have a national
identity. Ernst Gosebruch was a close friend of him, but perhaps did not
understand that repeating the same concepts in 1927 and 1947 entirely ignored
the changed historical perspective of Germany after the defeat.
Therefore,
it is entirely possible that all texts were ready in 1948 (manuscript /
typewritten texts at least for the second and third volumes, and materials for
the fourth volume), but that they were still not immediately publishable,
because they were no longer in line with German art’s absolute necessity to
mark a clear break with the Nazi past. To circulate the text as prepared by
Nolde would have put his reputation at risk. Perhaps Nolde, very old, even did
not realize it in full. It is not inconceivable that the second, much younger
wife Jolantha, which he married in 1948, and his closest associates tried to
gain time, avoiding the publication of autobiographical texts when he was still
alive, so that they could make the necessary corrections afterwards. Only after
his death, they started a review of the texts that would allow to transform the
Memoirs into a factor of strength,
not weakness, of the image of the artist in post-war Germany.
In
short, immediately after his death, the tight circle of friends and associates in
the Foundation realized that there was a chance and a real opportunity to
present Nolde to the German and European public opinion in a completely new
way: as an artist projected towards a modern art of European and international
taste, as a victim of Nazi persecution, as an artist who suffered an unfair
ban, and who dared to defy it, continuing to paint in secret. The same artistic
arguments that had been the cause of his misfortune during the Nazi era (his
use of colour based on violent contrasts, his taste for a primitive pictorial
language, its violation of any classic form, his non-traditional compositions
on religious themes) now helped to present him as an independent painter, who had
challenged convention and opened the way to experimental art. In this
framework, to instantly publish the Memoirs
would have become a nuisance. In sum, in the new battle to conquer the German
public, the model of the warrior to follow was that to Quintus Fabius Maximus,
the procrastinator. Not that of General Custer!
The
turning point in the timing of publication of the Memoirs was probably 1958.
Since the death of the painter (1956) the management of Nolde’s image was now fully
in the hands of the Foundation, under the leadership of Joachim von Lepel
(1913-1962). Any publication about Nolde was subject to authorization. The circles of art criticism were already informed that the Foundation held two manuscripts
ready for publication since years: one, sometimes mentioned as "The journey
to New Guinea" and sometimes as "The journey in the South Seas",
had been completed in 1936, and covered the events of the journey between 1913
and 1914. The other, entitled "World and homeland" (Welt und Heimat), covered all years during
the First World War and those that followed, between 1914 and 1921.
In
the catalogue of the exhibition at the Kunstverein in Frankfurt
(August-September 1958), edited by the Foundation, the information appears that,
immediately after the second volume just released in the first part of 1958, a third volume was
to be published in the autumn of that year, with the title "World and
homeland". Therefore, at that time, the publication of the third volume was
given for imminent. But the publication was cancelled. So, suddenly, the
editorial plans changed. The priority was assigned to the exhibitions and the
publication of catalogues.
Finally,
in 1965 the two manuscripts were published in a joint issue with the combined
title: "World and homeland. The trip to the South Seas" (Welt und Heimat. Die Südseereise). In
short, not only the timing changed, but – it cannot be excluded – also the contents.
The greatest part of the third volume, in the version of 1965, was dedicated to
the journey in New Guinea. The issue is critical: in the current version the
space devoted to the fundamental years between the end of the trip to New
Guinea (1914) and 1921 is very small. I suspect that large parts of the
sections on these years may have been altered between 1957 and 1965. If this
were really the case, it would be really serious: these were the years of the
First World War, of the following attempts of coup d'etat from right and left
extremists, of the difficult start of the Weimar Republic. What was deleted by
the Foundation? And if nothing was deleted, why was suddenly decided to delay
the publication by seven years?
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| Fig. 4) Article by Attilio Podesta "Emil Nolde and German Expressionism" at the Venice Biennale of 1952 (Emporium, Vol. CXVI, n. 691-692, p. 29) |
In
conclusion, the publication of the Memoirs
was repeatedly delayed by the Foundation, which shifted its focus to the
ability of Nolde’s artwork to amaze the audience, in the hope of a great emotional
success. And that is just what happened. The exhibitions at the Venice Biennale
of the early fifties (1950, 1952 and 1956), under the aegis of the Director
Umbro Apollonio, and the first two editions of Documenta in Kassel (1955 and
1959) under the guidance of Werner Haftmann, not only revived Nolde as an
artist, not only included him in a solid European framework, but also made of
him one of the leading aesthetic figures opposing to Nazism. Haftmann first
wrote a series of essays on the techniques used by Nolde, and then (in 1958) an
important monograph, which was published the following year in the United
States. In 1960, a major retrospective was held in Berlin; in 1963 it was the
turn of the exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art. In those years,
the idea was born that Nolde was to be seen as a necessary step between the
German expressionism of the thirties and the postwar American abstract
expressionism: you cannot understand contemporary art without him.
To
avoid problems, it was felt that it would be better to avoid any transparency
on the biographical reality. It is proven that the Nolde Foundation (owner of
all copyrights for any use of all the works of art by Nolde) allowed Haftmann
to publish the 1958 monograph only on the condition that he would not speak about
his support to the Nazis. In Germany, of course, there were dissident voices
reminiscent of Nolde’s past intentions to promote a nationalist modern art
(among them, the painter Karl Hofer, a champion of French pictorial culture,
who died in 1955). However, the new mantra of art criticism recalibrated things
this way: Nolde was none but a naive painter, not interested in politics; he
was anyway an artist marked by a fundamental coherence of pictorial language, since
the years of Wilhelmine Germany to Adenauer’s Germany; he was part of a
collective artistic movement in Europe marked by contributions from French
(Fauves) and Germans (Expressionism), which wanted to take up the legacy of
Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Gauguin. Finally, despite contradictions and initial
hesitation, he was a substantial victim of the Nazi regime. The first two
directors of the Nolde Foundation (Joachim von Lepel 1956-1962 and Martin Urban
from 1962 until 1992) became the custodians of this new doctrine.
In
sum, Nolde established himself as a hero of fantasy - in Germany, in Europe and
in the world - also because his Memoirs
were first kept well secret and then published in ways that would confirm the
success already reached at the exhibitions in Seebüll, in the headquarters of
the Foundation, and afterwards everywhere. It almost seems like if there had
been a wise strategy to first build a new image of the artist with exhibitions,
and only after to document his life. In 1957, Hans Fehr, a long-time friend of
Nolde, published a Book of friendship, which essentially comforted
the enthusiastic approach of thousands and thousands of people who visited more
and more his exhibitions. He was the personality who opened the celebrations in
the same year, when the museum in Seebüll was inaugurated. Modern historians, like
Kirsten Jüngling and Christian Saehrendt, did not have many doubts in saying
that the publication of the Memoirs
by the Nolde Foundation was the result of manipulation whose extent still had
to be quantified. Until 1962 - the date of death of von Lepel - the Foundation
sought to document its own activities in an objective way, by publishing annual
reports. The first also included the composition of the Curatorship (which
included only trusted friends and no art critic); the subsequent reports
offered a detailed list of all publications and exhibitions on Nolde, in
Germany and abroad. The new director, Martin Urban, was an art critic with a background
closely tied to the region of Nolde. As von Lepel, he was born in 1913; he stood
in a line of continuity, if not for three aspects. First, any transparency
disappeared also on institutional activities of the Foundation (no annual
reports anymore). Second, the number of exhibitions sharply increased. Third,
there was a clear turn of the publications in a commercial sense. In other
words, the Foundation became a profit centre.
In
1967 - an important year, when the centenary of the birth of the painter was celebrated
- the four volumes of Memoirs were
finally published. They made together an imposing work of 880 pages. But the
Foundation wanted - at the same time - to take precautions.
In
fact, the official speech for the centenary of Nolde’s birth was assigned to
Walter Jens, one of the leading literary critics and philologists of the time,
a scholar of the highest reputation. The laudation had the Memoirs as its main theme. Jens, with a memorable speech, sounded
an alarm bell. He explained that the Memoirs
of Nolde - in the circulating version - were full of ambiguities and
unacceptable statements, were also weak from a literary point of view, and testified
that Nolde certainly did not deserve the reputation as a leader of the internal
opposition to Nazism. He explained that the pre-war versions - no longer in
circulation - contained even more worrying elements. However - he continued - the quality of his art went well beyond all these shortcomings, and Nolde had first of all to be
interpreted as an intimate artist that aroused intense emotions of the public and
gave freedom to the dreams of their mind. Indeed, Jens literally said that the
Nazis may have been indeed right: Rosenberg and company had perhaps understood,
better than Nolde himself, that with such a sublime art, Nolde could have never
been one of them. In short: the artist dominated the author of the Memoirs. The first had to be praised,
the second to be rejected. The text of the speech by Jens was also translated
into English and served as an introduction in the catalogue of the
retrospective exhibition in London the following year.
Nolde as a secular hero in the novel by Siegfried
Lenz
We
are in 1968. A new event further amplified Nolde’s reputation in Germany and
worldwide. Siegfried Lenz - a major German novelist of the twentieth century -
published his best-selling novel, entitled 'The German lesson' (Deutschstunde). It was one of the first
novels in Germany to question the setting of the German society, based on
obedience, sense of domination and repression. Nolde wanted that his readers would
reflect on the substantial continuity between totalitarian repression in Nazi
Germany and social repression in Germany after the war. He needed a hero who -
with his biography - would evidence that Germany also had an internal resistance,
with a different biography and behaviour from that required by the regime.
Alas, for this purpose he chose Emil Nolde as a source of inspiration, even if,
in the novel, he gave him a different name (Max Ludwig Nansen). He did so even
if he knew that there were question marks on Nolde, as evidenced by the Memoirs, but like Jens he judged them as
a peripheral element in the biography of the painter. He may have thought that
offering a simple literary variation of the original theme, drawing a Nansen
very similar to, but also different from, the real painter, was sufficient. In
other words, he created a ‘better’ Nolde.
In
fact, there is no doubt that Siegfried Lenz’s painter is actually Nolde. The
biography, the character, the geography, the art style, the subject of the
paintings, the way of speaking and writing, everything matches. In addition,
Lenz took inspiration from Haftmann’s 1958 monograph to select a number of
Nolde’s important paintings, which are described in the novel with an exceptional
ability of ekphrasis. Comparing Lenz’s literary portraits and Haftmann’s rich
and elaborate descriptions, some very stimulating affinities as well as
intentional differences in themes and language are to be found. In the novel,
the ekphrasis of Nolde’s paintings by Lenz served to strengthen the sense of
drama in the crucial moments of the script. The reader was deliberately given
the impression that these were descriptions of authentic art pieces, and that
true art was an integral part of the novel.
The
Israeli writer Amos Oz wrote that the novel - which has been translated into
twenty languages - caused him to change his opinion on Germany to the best. The work became
a bestseller in Poland and Russia, opening these countries to the new West
German culture. For the German youth in 1968, it legitimated rebellion against
the system; for Germany's Willy Brandt, it was a new symbol of legitimacy.
Brandt asked Lenz to accompany him to Poland, when he kneeled in Warsaw in 1970
to commemorate the ghetto uprising.
The
novel was adapted into a television drama (filmed in 1971, directed by Peter
Beauvais) that has been broadcast repeatedly on public television.
The second phase of the Memoirs’ manipulation
The
masterpiece of Lenz turned Nolde into a real collective political hero, a
symbol of identity for a new Germany. Hundreds of thousands of people visited
the exhibitions dedicated to him (340 in Germany, between 1945 and 1990,
according to Christian Saehrendt) and his house in Seebüll (up to 80,000
visitors a year), which is also the headquarters of the Foundation Nolde. Emil
Nolde became the myth of the German political class. A recent book by Jörg
Magenau on the friendship between Schmidt and Lenz explains the importance of
their shared love for Nolde. Helmut Schmidt enjoyed him so much - from his
early age, thanks to a high school teacher with very open-minded ideas - to
organize an exhibition on the artist at the Chancellery in Bonn in 1982.
Richard von Weizsacker provided patronage for an exhibition in Moscow. Angela Merkel
holds a painting of Nolde in his office in Berlin. Nolde is, today, the most
famous and beloved German artist of the twentieth century.
Lenz's
masterpiece turned to be a double edged sword for the Memoirs’ management by the Nolde Foundation. Once he had become the
reference artist of new Germany, confused by a large number of Germans with the
hero of Deutschstunde, it became
increasingly difficult to manage the ambiguity of Nolde’s Memoirs. Just to say that he was a great painter in art, but a poor
naive in politics, was not enough. It was perhaps for this reason that in 1976
a new version of the Memoirs was
prepared, which not only brought them
together, but also drastically reduced them. A comparison of the 1967 and 1976
versions reveals that the cuts were really important. From the second volume
disappeared all references to the racial theory of society, all most extreme
pages on the Germanness of art; all most contentious passaged on expressionist
painters; all most radical references to the culture of France and Italy. From
the fourth volume disappeared the whole chapter devoted to the Second World War,
including, for example, the ten pages of letters by Ada Nolde to the soldiers
at the front. Thus, after the first manipulative episode between 1948 and 1958-1967,
from the autobiography was finally eliminated any other element that would not be
compatible with the now affirmed 'mythical' image of the painter.
Such
a great success can also become a serious embarrassment, however, at least in
intellectual terms. The perfect identity between the visual aspects (colour,
innovation), fiction (Lenz) and narration in the new version of Memoirs created incentives to develop a
true "Nolde trade-mark", an activity that is still - to use economic
terminology - a monopoly, with all its obvious drawbacks in terms of efficiency
and effectiveness. The management of copyrights - basically in the hands of the
Foundation - not only allowed to reward one school of thought, but the
Foundation really developed into a money-driven company, which expanded its
activities with the opening of a branch in the heart of Berlin in 2007 (now
closed). However, like in all monopolies, the consumer pays the price, because he
gets delivered always the same version of the product. In particular, Nolde’s
art ends up being presented as a pure creation of amazing beauty, but whose
univocal interpretation is in many respects only superficial.
In
fact, taking a careful look at the catalogues of exhibitions and publications
on Nolde for decades, what is striking is that it was a limited set of authors
(in essence, the two directors of the Foundation) to produce similar inputs
always on the same issues, in a completely self-referential universe. If,
therefore, Nolde had been perhaps the victim of excessive litigation in the years
of the Weimar Republic, in the Federal Republic of Germany he had become an
icon supported by a form of ‘hoarding behaviour'.
One
of the reasons that supported this type of cultural monopolism was the cold
war: in the German Democratic Republic, until the mid-eighties, Nolde (and
expressionism in general) were seen with some disdain: a bourgeois artistic
movement with the sin of aesthetic formalism. Moreover, they had not been able
to oppose Nazism. In the 1950-1960 decades, behind the Iron Curtain Nolde suffered
the same cultural disruption to which the Nazis had condemned him in the mid 1930s. Indeed, shortly
after his death he was openly accused of paraphrasing Nazi ideology. Nolde
therefore became a topic for an east-west dispute, with the United States fully
prepared to support the reasons for the Expressionist movement (and for Nolde)
against the Soviet real socialism. Not surprisingly, Nolde’s exhibitions were
often held in West Berlin (a showcase of the Western world), in the years of
the Cold War.
This
did not mean that Nolde could be fully ignored behind the Iron Curtain. Lenz's
novel was an immediate bestselling success in the Soviet Union and in Eastern
Europe. A section on Nolde was inserted into the second tome of the fifth
volume of the imposing Soviet art-source anthology, entitled "The Masters of Art on Art", which was released in Moscow in 1969. And in the GDR,
despite the objections on his ideological errors, Nolde was finally given attention
by the critics, as in the monograph of Horst Jähner on the Bridge ("Brücke")
group, published in 1984.
More
generally, Nolde’s art production became a sort of real 'commodity', and
himself was transformed into an art icon for the crowds. Nolde’s art pieces even
developed into a veritable export good to trade across the world, in a Germany
which had become a major exporter not only of manufacturing, but also of art
and most likely copyrights. Nolde became therefore an ambassador of Germany in the
world, very useful to highlight a positive image of the country in the
aesthetic field and beyond it. In the catalogues published abroad, it was
therefore often stressed that Nolde had travelled a lot, and therefore a new image
of him, perhaps very far from reality, was drawn from the biography (and the Memoirs): that of Nolde as a
cosmopolitan citizen, a true global man, in the literal sense of an intellectual
capable of grasping the nuances differentiating cultures around the globe. As
he wrote himself in the second book of records, he was however, in my opinion,
entirely convinced of the merits of a racial idea of humanity, which
fragmented humans in different groups, foreign to each other, and led him to condemn
any commingling of ideas and to reject any "hybrid art".
Anyway,
here is a partial list of exhibitions outside Germany specifically dedicated to
him, (to include collective exhibitions on expressionism would multiply the
number of events for a multiplicative factor probably close to 2-3): New York
(1955), London, Odense and Venice (1956), Boston (1957), Copenhagen and New
York (1958), Caracas and Paris (1959), Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro and Vienna
(1960), Brussels (1961), New York (1963), Dublin (1964), Vienna (1965), London
(1966), Copenhagen, Humlebaek and Stockholm (1967), London (1968), Chicago and
Lyon (1969), London and Reykjavik (1970), Tokyo (1972), Belgrade and New York
(1979), Chicago and Mexico City (1980), Tokyo (1981), New Delhi (1982), Rome
(1984), Humlebaek (1986), Gravelines (1988), Moscow and Leningrad (1990),
Lugano and Vienna (1994), Boston, Los Angeles and London (1995), Copenhagen and
Paris (1996), Madrid (1997), Barcelona (1998), Vienna (1999), Palma de Mallorca
(2000), Vienna (2001), New York (2004), Paris (2008), Montpellier (2009), Davos
and Ordrupgaard (2010), Oslo and Vienna (2013), Humlebaek (2014), Gothenburg, Winterswijk
and Stockholm (2015).
How to avoid that ancient doubts would come out again? One of the preferred ways to avoid raising embarrassing questions was to confront both West German and international public with writings of the same authors, indefinitely repeated. A search on www.worldcat.org reveals that Martin Urban, the director of the Foundation 1962-1992, produced 46 different writings on Nolde during his tenure, including some important works (such as a catalogue raisonné of oil paintings in two volumes, unfortunately out of commerce since time and available on the antiquarian market at absolutely prohibitive prices) but also a monotonous list of inputs for exhibitions in Germany and elsewhere. In addition, publications and exhibitions were repeatedly produced on specific and completely apolitical topics, like watercolours and prints, engravings, painting on flowers, depictions of the sea, the oil paintings on religious themes, flowers and animals, portraits, Berlin nightlife, etc. The champion of this technique seems to have been Manfred Reuther, who succeeded Martin Urban in 1992 as director of the Foundation and for twenty years followed this policy, signing 31 volumes, catalogues and articles marked by the clear prevalence of images on script. When in 2012 Reuther retired, the Foundation had edited and published - on behalf of its two last directors – something less than eighty writings, which all track the same profile of the painter. The commercial intent, aimed at a lay audience, is very clear. An embarrassing legacy.
The doubts of the 2000s
With
the end of the century, however, a number of historians and critics began to
ask questions about the Memoirs. I
would mention in particular Uwe Danker, Bernd Fulda, Kirsten Jüngling, Felix
Krämer, Christian Saehrendt, Aya Soko and James Van Dyke. More and more, hints
emerged from the archives to confirm questions and doubts on the interpretation
of Nolde, doubts that had always existed among art historians and already
became evident just by crossing the different versions of the second autobiographical
volume (and also reading, in the pre-war version, the articles by Max
Sauerlandt, the art critic who most supported Nolde’s attempt in the 1930s to
win the Nazis’ simpathy).
The
retrospective exhibition in Frankfurt in 2014, in this sense, was a real
breakthrough. For the first time, the attention of the catalogue was on the
question of the historical identity of Nolde (actually, this had already been
discussed at an exhibition in Lugano in 1994, curated by the Italian art
historian Rudy Chiappini). The full-page article by Jochen Hieber in the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, on April 26, 2014, transformed a debate between experts in a dispute followed by the general public and discussed on
all major German media. It was discussed for months during 2014.
Even
at the Nolde Foundation it seems a new course opened, after Reuther retired in
2012, the brief interregnum of Christine Hopfengart as director in 2013, and
especially with the new direction of Christian Ring. Ring himself recently
announced that two of the just cited historians, Bernd Fulda and Aya Soko, will
complete a major research project with the aim of getting to present new elements
of information in 2017, to mark the 150 year anniversary of the birth of Nolde.
We hope that this will also be also an opportunity to publish the first
critical edition of the Memoirs, of
which we remain convinced there is an urgent need. [N.B. The above mentioned exhibition in Berlin presents the results of this research. While I have read several press reviews, I was not yet able to see the show at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, nor to read the catalogue edited by Prestel with the title "Emil Nolde. The Artist during the Third Reich".]
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Kirsten - Emil Nolde. Die Farben sind meine Noten (Colours are my Tones),
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Emil - Briefe aus den Jahren 1894-1926 (Letters from the Years 1894-1926),
Berlin, Furche Verlag, 1967, pp.183
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Nolde,
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Nolde,
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Emil
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Homeland. The Journey to the South Seas 1913-1918, drafted in 1936) 1936 Köln,
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im Dialog 1905-1913 (Nolde in Dialogue 1905-1913) Quellen und Beiträge, Hirmer
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Swantje - Korrespondenzen zwischen
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Jonathan - The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany, New York,
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Bremen, Verlag Michael Hertz, 3 pages and 40 etchings, 1948
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Paul - Kunstdiktatur im Dritten Reich (Art Dictatorship in the Third Reich),
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