W.How deeply Hans Emil Hansen was rooted in the north German-Danish landscape is shown not only in his pictures. This bond is also reflected in the fact that he gave up his family name in 1902 and exchanged it for that of his home village in northern Schleswig-Holstein, Nolde. How this Emil Nolde became the “Nordic German” artist he saw himself as is shown by the Hamburg Bucerius Kunst Forum in cooperation with the Nolde Foundation Seebüll under the title “Nolde and the North”. The artist, who felt equally connected to Germany and Denmark, first had to become aware of his roots.
This happened less through the direct experience of the native landscape than through the detour via Danish painting, which he again did not discover in its place of origin, but at the Paris World Exhibition in 1900. Motivated by the impressions received there, Nolde spent the following two years in Denmark. There he, who had already graduated from art schools in Munich and Paris, took painting lessons from the successful history painter Kristian Zahrtmann, visited exhibitions by local artists and met with some of them such as Vilhelm Hammershøi and Viggo Johansen privately or in their studios. The focus of the exhibition is on the works that were created during this time of searching and experimenting, which is divided into four thematic rooms: images of man, interior, landscape and fantasy. The eighty works by Nolde are juxtaposed with twenty-five paintings by Danish artists whom Nolde verifiably knew and which clearly show the influence of this painting on his choice of motifs and style.
Its romantic blue tonality
The “Danish” Nolde, whom one meets in Hamburg, only has traces of the colorful expressionists of later years. Muted colors dominate: a self-portrait that opens the exhibition is in shaded brown tones, blue-gray washed-out seascapes are reminiscent of an unfinished William Turner, some port images could have come from Monet’s workshop. In general, impressionism is a dominant style pattern in Nolde’s pictures in this phase. Thirty years later, that no longer fits in with his artistic self-image: Now he reviles Impressionism as “sweet” in order to set himself apart from it as a Nordic-bitter expressionist. The artistic path to Expressionism is shown particularly impressively by three storm-blown “milking girls” that Nolde painted in 1903 and then again in 1939. In the second version, the shimmering of the brushstrokes placed next to one another has given way to a luminous, two-dimensional application of paint – the “typical Nolde” has taken shape.
What Nolde learns from his Danish colleagues is, in addition to the imagery of symbolism, above all the use of light, an eye for moods and a romantic blue tonality. The juxtaposition of his painting “Two on the seashore”, painted in 1903, with Peder Severin Krøyer’s “Summer Evening on the South Beach of Skagen”, made ten years earlier, convincingly demonstrates these metamorphoses. During this time, Nolde also painted interiors with female figures, a typical theme in Danish painting that no longer appears in his later work. But it is precisely with this quiet, undramatic subject that he gives an idea of the later color strength: he adopted the bright pink tones that Nolde saw in a mountain motif by his teacher Kristian Zahrtmann for his “girl in the kitchen”.
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