Until 9th January 2009, the Grand Palais in Paris will be hosting the biggest retrospective dedicated to the controversial artist Emil Nolde (1867-1956) who was rediscovered in all his expressive verve after the Nazis censured his works forbidding him to paint. It is a rich exhibition featuring 90 paintings and other 70 works, between watercolours, drawings and engravings.  The German painter, whose real name was Emil Hansen, was born in the German village of Nolde in the region of Schleswig Holstein at the boundary with Denmark. He later approached the art of painting, as he first started to work in a furniture factory to become a wood carver and illustrator.  After staying in Switzerland where he taught ornamental drawing, he got to know big cities like Munich and Berlin where, frequenting museums, he started to appreciate ancient art and some artists like Rembrandt, Daumier and Manet. From 1904 he refined his style, susceptible to the impressionist influence, but in time he developed a marked propensity for the tones of expressionism, no longer operating on a mere retinal perception of the subject, but changing the description according to the motions of the soul by using strong chromatic choices, similarly to Gauguin and Munch, and creating a formal semplification-destructuration, which deformed the human figure.  In 1906 his friendship with Schmidt-Rottluff  led him to expose with the German expressionist group Die Brücke, to then approach the Berlin Secession and the Blaue Reiter, period in which the art of Van Gogh and contacts with Ensor amplified and aggravated even more the dramatic outcomes of his pictorial style.  Nolde, polyhedral artist both for his technical profile and for his thematic choices, engaged in drawing and painting, watercolours and engraving; he produced works tending to mysticism such as landscapes and descriptions of the frantic nightlife in Berlin. In 1913-14 a journey across faraway lands influenced once again his modus operandi stressing that throbbing vein of primitivism that he already felt inside him and favouring his predilection for marked exotic aspects and primordial forms, allowing colour to spread and dominate on the canvas in an increasingly insistent way, to the disadvantage of gradually retreating lines and contours.
The important exhibition in Paris has been skillfully articulated in 10 sections that, chronologically and thematically, mark the steps of the painter’s artistic career:
The enchanted mountain, A village, Fighting years, Biblical stories and legends, Graphic works, Berlin nights, World, Homeland, Fantasies and unpainted paintings, The sea.
It starts with The enchanted mountain, a section that has a literary and evocative name, which traces back to Thomas Mann’s atmospheres, and contemplates Nolde’s debut, his formation and his stay in Switzerland, which generated notes about the faces of local people with characteristic and familiar traits.  The following section, a Village, highlights the artist’s exclusive attachment to his own hometown, Nolde, to which he decided to pay tribute, like other great artists of the past, by taking it in his surname as an indelible mark from 1902. This attachment is evident in his paintings in which the artist and his hometown emerge, as indeed Nolde himself claimed:  “I know my hometown, I think of it, I feel it (…), go and visit it and there you will see my pictures”.
Fighting years is the original title of the second volume of his autobiography which describes, in parallel with his images, very difficult years of his life when he encountered misery.
Very important in his artistic life was also his religious production: Nolde felt close to nature and its manifestations and he perceived the world breathing, in his view at the mercy of primitive spirits.  Then he created other works, also on the imprint of some engravings by Daumier, in the attempt to capture and pass on the spirit of nature. Works immediately followed by the section dedicated to graphics, an important aspect of the painter which characterized various Northern impressionist artists, once again confirming the attachment to traditions, revisited in modern key, however.
Berlin nights is probably the section that highlights mostly the contradictions of a city in the view of an artist who came from a rural and humble reality.  Nolde discovered the big city for the first time when he was 21 years old visiting first Munich and then moving to Berlin, a crowded place, full of people and poverty, in which he felt ignored and lonely, however.  The canvases of that period describe this feeling, the isolation, the inner desolation but also the attraction and the charm of the lively nights in cafés and theatres of a city that never seems to sleep.
World is the title of the section dedicated to his journey between 1913 and 1914 across Siberia, then Korea, Japan, China, the Philippines and finally New Guinea.  In these faraway lands Nolde peculiarly felt at ease, at home, fascinated by the indigenous populations, in harmony with nature and the cosmos unlike the empty “puppets” of the so-defined civilized society.  Masks and exotic elements become part of his creative world.
Homeland is also the title of the third volume of the autobiography in which Nolde, despite his openness towards the world, does not disown and does not forget the attachment to his land, which he always felt to belong to identifying himself in it. Mystery and rarefied atmospheres are found in the second last section dedicated to fantasies and “unpainted” images, where we find traces of more liquid and lighter, almost dreamlike traits and the indefinite is the protagonist.
The last section is dedicated to the sea.  Schleswig Holstein is a land surrounded by water, a region between two seas, the Baltic and the North Sea, and like a sort of cold Atlantis it stretches out on this expanse of water.  The singular collocation of this region could not be ignored by the artist who was born in that place and who also had his own atelier near the sea, from which many times he drew inspiration representing it in very different ways, although he always described it as a mirror of his own strong bond with nature. The sea, the idea of impetus, of captivating strength and at the same time a great container, the basin of emotions. 

http://www.rmn.fr/Emil-Nolde

(translated by Giorgina Arcuri)