Emil Nolde: Inner religious feeling

Emil Nolde: The Religious Paintings is at the Berlin Extension of The Ada and Emil Nolde Foundation until 15th April.
'Emil Nolde considered his "biblical and mythical pictures" to be the high point of his artistic achievements. He kept a pedantic, handwritten record of the works, assigning some fifty paintings to this canon. "Religious, biblical pictures came about every few years", Nolde wrote. "The imaginings of the boy I once was, who sat engrossed in the Bible on long winter evenings, were reawakened. When I read, I saw pictures: the richest Middle Eastern fantasies. They constantly flew around in my mind's eye until much, much later the grown man and artist painted and painted them, as if inspired by a dream."'

Nolde, as Felicity Lunn writes in Emil Nolde, “regarded his religious works as central to his art” saying that “he experienced both a greater struggle and a more intense pleasure in the making of them than in any other area of his subject matter”:

“The group of paintings that Nolde made in 1909, in particular The Last Supper and Pentecost, demonstrate the artist’s attempts to portray Christian themes “with spiritual content and innerness” through a radical stylistic change … “the transformation from optical external charm to an experienced inner value”, asserted Nolde in his autobiography …

The momentum that began with these two paintings continued for three years until 1912, a period in which 24 works were produced, including The Life of Christ, stories from the New Testament, particularly events from the life of Christ and their effect on others, miracles He performed and parables …

The tour de force of Nolde’s religious painting, if not of his entire artistic output, is the nine-part work The Life of Christ. The idea of making a polyptych first came to Nolde in 1912 when he happened to place next to each other three religious paintings from the previous year. The remaining six were painted in 1912, and due to a change in Nolde’s approach during this period the polyptych is stylistically heterogeneous …

At the time Nolde was painting The Life of Christ he was experiencing great stress, caused partly by the serious illness of his wife, Ada, but also by emotional extremes of despair and optimism. The spirituality that radiates from the biblical figures in Pentecost and The Last Supper seems to have been replaced here by exaggerated, almost caricatured features often distorted by aggression and anger. Nolde was currently plagued by doubts concerning Christianity …

The third period of Nolde’s religious painting came in 1915, following his return from the Southern Seas, and was accompanied by a dramatic simplification of both form and colour. One of the most important of the seven paintings he made on religious themes was Entombment … Nolde described the work as “the most beautiful … that I was able to produce for a long time … a painting handled in light silver blue, opposite yellowish gold, and in terms of content in inner religious feeling.” Other paintings made in the same year, such as Legend: Saint Simeon and the Woman and The Tribute Money are also characterized by simpler structures, gentler and more lyrical than the passion of earlier work. Although reduced in palette, the colours are saturated and intense.”

Nolde’s religious works were recognized as significant by his supporters but “in contrast, however, were the reactions of more academic artists on the one hand, and the Church and the general public on the other.” His “religious paintings were accused of being “destructive and vandalising” and full of “clumsiness and brutality” as well as “mockery and blasphemy” and, as a result, were on several occasions removed from exhibitions. Eventually The Life of Christ was prominently displayed in the Nazi organized ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition which sought to hold the work of many of the Expressionists and other Modernist artists up to ridicule but instead drew large and fascinated crowds."

I first saw a significant body of Nolde's work at the Whitechapel Gallery exhibition of his Unpainted Paintings in 1990. Andrew Graham-Dixon explains:

"By the mid-1930s, Hitler, Goebbels and company had decided that Expressionist painting amounted to no more than a parody of the Nazi dream of Germanic racial purity. Nolde's art was labelled ''degenerate'', more than 1,000 of his works were confiscated from German museums and he was forbidden to paint.

The ''Unpainted Pictures'', as he called them, are the works which Nolde did not paint in the later 1930s. He did not paint them, that is, as far as the Gestapo - who checked up on him periodically - were concerned. They are all watercolours, which had the advantage for their creator of being small, and therefore easy to hide. Hard to smell out in other ways too: watercolours (unlike oils) are odour-free.

The ''Unpainted Pictures'' glow with vivid, saturated colour, but the frenzied Expressionism of Nolde's early years seems to have given way to something else. Solitary ships sail towards explosive, firework-display sunsets. Other images offer brief resumes of old themes - dancing girls and troubled northern skies - but suffused with a deep, dark richness of hue that translates as brooding melancholy. They seem the works of an artist for whom sheer obduracy - the very fact that he can continue to paint at all - has become a last resort."

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Jackson Browne - The Rebel Jesus.