In 1906, at the age of forty, Emil Nolde was invited by his friend Karl Schmidt-Rottluff to join Ernst Ludwig-Kirchner’s laboratory of modernism, Die Brücke.
Nolde’s association with the group only lasted a year but the experience was to have profound effect on his art, not least his total embrace of the idea of ‘modernist primitivism,’ modern art’s obsession with the art of ‘outsiders’ as the means to access a deeper visual and cultural ‘truth.’
Nolde had moved to Berlin in 1902 to find himself as a modern artist, experimenting with all the available modalities of the time – Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and Symbolism. But his encounter with Schmidt-Rottluff, Kirchner et.al. saw him emerge as a fully-fledged Expressionist, a
painter of the city’s underbelly, of ‘otherness’ and dislocation, his existentialist subject- matter given ‘expression’ in a raw, jagged style of painting, with strong linear outlines, unsophisticated brushwork and a bright, other-worldly palette.
It’s Nolde’s use of colour that sets him apart from his contemporaries – perhaps with the exception of Kandinsky, with whom he exhibited in Der Blaue Reiter group shows in Munich. For Nolde, the motif is merely the starting point for a sensuous layering of colours. Throughout his career he used watercolour to this effect, enjoying the liquidity of the medium, especially the ability to blur the boundaries between each field of colour. We see this most, of course, in his later ‘Unpainted Pictures’ of the 1940s, when, deemed ‘Degenerate’ by the Nazi regime, Nolde was forced to work in secret, having been denied the use of paints and canvas.
Zoos, fairgrounds, cabarets, theatres were all interlinked sites of enquiry for the Expressionists, spaces that sat within the city but somehow outside of its conventions – as did the great ethnographical collections of Berlin’s Völkerkundermuseum, where Nolde spent hours copying the art of non-European peoples.
A number of Nolde’s zoo studies from 1923- 24 – Gnu, Ginat Tuka, Chameleons – were exhibited in London in 1968, in an Arts Council exhibition of watercolours from the Nolde Foundation in Seebü ll, held at the Hayward Gallery.
