Emil Nolde: The Cunning Expressive Fascist

I got up early with Carol at 11am on Sunday 4^th March 2018, as we planned to go to see Emil Nolde: Colour is Life in the National Gallery of Ireland. Due to The Beast from the East and Storm Emma and the resulting heavy snow which had shut down Dublin for three days – the exhibition was free on Sunday. And Carol and I had such cabin fever after being stuck indoors - that we welcomed the opportunity to get out of the house.                                                                      

Emil Nolde: Colour is Life was the first major exhibition devoted to the Danish/German Expressionist in Dublin since a far smaller one in the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1964. It included 120 oil paintings, watercolours, prints and drawings from the Nolde Foundation dedicated to his art in his German homeland on the German/Danish border. Yet, even though I was delighted to view such a large body of work devoted to an Expressionist master - my enthusiasm was tempered by the early headlines of reviews of the exhibition that included Alastair Sooke’s Emil Nolde: fiery, nightmarish art by a card-carrying Nazi and Jonathan Jones’s Emil Nolde review - A seething visionary twisted by antisemitism. Knowing that I was going to write a blog on Nolde, I read in preparation every book on him I owned and every review of his art that I had in my files - and it was depressing reading. But I had hoped to make a traditional defence for the art - despite the man.                                      

After getting up, Carol and I got dressed and had a coffee before heading out to the Nolde exhibition. On our way down the snow strewn road, I told Carol “the important things to know about Emil Nolde was that he was an Expressionist rebel when he was middle aged but then a Nazi party member and lover of Hitler in old age! So the important question is can you separate the art from the life…” “No you can’t! I hate Nazis!” Carol interrupted. “So will we go back home?” I asked. “No! No! I like his paintings! I want to see the exhibition! And besides, they’re all dead now!” Carol replied. “Well the interesting thing is, that no matter how hard he tried to get the Nazis to approve of his art – they hated it!” I observed. After getting the DART into town we went to the National Gallery of Ireland and I bought the catalogue to the exhibition and we had mochas in the café to wake us up.    

                                                                                                        

The more I adore an artist the more I write about them – I can’t help it. But seeing this exhibition on Emil Nolde turned me against him - so frankly I don’t care too much about his life. Nolde is a perfect example of what I would call the “asshole rule” – namely, some artists - regardless of their talents and originality - are such assholes that you simple want nothing to do with them! Or in today’s parlance you stop following them on Facebook and Instagram. And one can only imagine what crap Nolde would have bombarded your Facebook timeline with - had it existed back in the 1930s!     

                                                                                                 

He was born Hans Emil Hansen in 1867, in the village of Nolde on the German -Danish border. His father was German and his mother Danish. His fundamentalist Protestant family were of rural peasant stock and his father was a farmer. Emil Nolde had a protracted and undistinguished training as an artist in art schools in Germany and France. In 1902, he changed his name to Emil Nolde. His early work was a bleak and sinister form of fantastical and Romantic kistch with which he was quite successful - but already it was clear that quite apart from having little real conventional talent as an artist he had serious personality problems.                                                                                                 

  

In 1906, he was asked by the artist Karl Schmidt-Rottluff to join Die Brücke a group of young largely self-taught Expressionist painters based in Dresden that included Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel and Max Pechstein. With them he found sympathetic peers and a style that suited his limited abilities. They shared an obsession with Vincent van Gogh (though they lacked van Gogh’s rigorous self-training) and desired to work as directly and spontaneously as possible. None of them were traditionally skilled artists - but they made up for their lack of conventional ability - with intense and original expression. The solitary and anti-social Nolde liked to keep his distance from Die Brücke and did not share their youthful decadence and liberal politics and within a year he and left Die Brücke. Yet, is debatable if he would ever have flourished as an artist - if he had not learned from them, appropriated their style and jumped on their bandwagon.    

        

Despite the Modernity of his style, Nolde was a socially conservative reactionary and although he painted many canvases depicting female religious nudes and decadent Berlin nightlife – he did so ambivalently even accusatorily. Usually socially conservative, sanctimonious, bigoted and philistine artists paint in an illustrative realist style - where things look like what they look like in photograph - and make common sense. But Nolde was unusual because he was a socially conservative, sanctimonious and bigoted artist who painted in a very up-to-date form of Expressionism - where the world was twisted and coloured according to his own right-wing, Libertarian vision. Formally, Nolde invented nothing – he simply amped up to eleven all the stylistic advances of van Gogh, Gauguin, Ensor, Munch and the Die Brücke artists. I might even suggest that - knowing he lacked the talent and skill to paint academically - he was cunning enough to appropriate the far less technically challenging Expressionist style. And frankly, I have seen and met far too many of these cute whores in the art world – though usually they lack even Nolde’s ability.                                                         

Nolde married twice, his first wife was a Danish actress and they were married for forty-two years and she was to become as much a fan of Hitler as himself, after his first wife died and when Nolde was eighty-one he married his second wife who was twenty-six, he was incredibly arrogant and fought with virtually everyone who crossed his path, he thought the term Expressionist did not do his talents justice, despite playing the tortured artist and outsider he was a shrew marketer and skilled businessman, inspired by Paul Gauguin he travelled to the South Seas in 1913 and painted the natives in an effort to appropriate their culture, he wrote a self-pitying and arrogant autobiography the second volume of which titled My Struggle was published in 1934 and which contained many supportive comments about Nationalism and anti-Semitism perhaps to get the approval of the Nazis, he sold truckloads of paintings, his work was in countless German museums before the Nazi’s took power and removed them in 1937 and thirty-three of Nolde’s paintings and several of his works on paper were included in the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition – in which Modern artists were viciously mocked by the Nazis. After the war, despite his Nazi party membership, Nolde was absolved by the Denazification Committee and thinking him a persecuted Degenerate Artist, German curators put back up Nolde’s work. And so on. There are plenty of books on Nolde to read - if you really want to know the rest.                                                                                     

After our mochas in the National Gallery of Ireland’s café and a couple of cigarettes outside in the freezing cold, we went into the exhibition. Emil Nolde: Colour is Life was not hung chronologically but rather thematically and the oil paintings were hung in simple dark frames that superbly suited the work and avoided the distorting plague of gold gilt frames. The work was hung against the dark walls of the museum and spot-lit in a thrilling manner - that also suited their sulphurous nature. But looking at the mostly crude and sinister early paintings in the first room was a shock to the system. Even in the earliest canvases from 1901 when Nolde was already over thirty-four, it was clear that Nolde had little natural talent or conventional skills as a painter or draughtsman and his blaring and creepy work gave me a headache at first. But in the next room his work began to improve greatly. Though my concentration was disrupted for a while by a group of mothers and fathers with their children - who seemed to think the National Gallery of Ireland was a free crèshe - and great opportunity to loudly discuss their remarkable children.                                                                                     

           

Getting back into looking at Nolde’s work, I tried to think of another so-called major painter whose work varied so much in quality - from the crude and amateurish to the simply sublime. Yet, if anything this gave me greater faith in his integrity as a Modernist painter. Although the overall strategic style of Nolde’s work remained almost constant throughout his life - he took tactical risks with brushwork and colour in all his work. Nolde had the daring and courage to experiment and go for broke in every work he made. I have noted many times when looking at expressive work - that the greatest Expressionist and Neo-Expressionist artists – go to formal extremes no timid amateur ever would. Nolde’s refusal to get bogged down in details or worry too much about realism, his daring to paint from his imagination and simplify and amplify forms through directional brushstrokes, pastose paint and vivid colour - made him an archetypal Expressionist painter. Nolde’s pallet was uniquely his own and throughout his work he used the most incredible variety of vibrant yellows, reds, blues, purples, greens and oranges and he rarely used tones to shape forms - preferring to use different intensities of colour.                                                                                                                                                

By the room with scenes of Berlin night life Nolde was in full force and these spot-lit paintings glowed incandescently in the dim gallery. Yet already there were sinister overtones - that only viewing the work in the flesh really revealed viscerally. Many of the decadent men and women in these café scenes had ‘Jewish’ hooknoses but even worse was Noldes depiction of a Slav couple in Slovenians from 1911. On the other hand, his writhing female dancers in Candle Dance from 1912 were Expressionism at it ecstatic best.                                                 
                          

When we entered the room dedicated to Biblical themes I began to feel very uneasy. As an atheist I did not share his belief or religious furore. Besides, I did not think that Nolde was really convincing in his ugly religiosity.  For me, Nolde was far too selfish, obnoxious and intolerant a man - to claim piety and humility and I was repulsed by his hell and damnation view of life. When I stood in front of Martyrdom II from 1921, my stomach turned at the sight of Christ on the cross surrounded by monstrous looking Jews. And I nearly fainted in distress in front of such a crude, ugly and blatantly anti-Semitic work.                                                                                                                          

As I went around looking at the other portraits and figure paintings in the exhibition - I had the creeping feeling that I was looking at the world through an illustrated Nazi guide to ‘untermensch’ (‘inferior people’). Nolde’s portraits and figures revealed him to be a rural misanthrope at best – and an Aryan racist at worst. Nolde’s tendency towards caricature had the Expressionist defence that he sought to capture the essence of people – but it also meant that he simply did not look close enough at other people (because he actually hated them) and thus crudely reduced them to what he thought were their essentials. But it is notable that he paid far more attention to his Aryan models from his hometown and depicted them far more sensitively and beautifully. There were of course exceptions to this, and though most of his male figures from the South Seas were vulgar racial caricatures others were profoundly dignified - and Nolde did in fact have a great interest in ethnography and ‘primitive’ cultures – which was one of the reasons the Nazis could never accept his art.                                                                                                                                            

Then I came to the so called unpainted pictures a series of small watercolours on thin Japan paper that Nolde claimed that he had painted in secret when banned from painting by the Nazis and painting in oils was too risky. Yet recent research had discovered that many of the watercolours might have been painted before the ban and others even painted after the war and that despite the ban Nolde had still managed to paint some oil paintings during the ban. The unpainted pictures were still as formally inventive and delightful as they had been when I had studied them enthusiastically in books over the years – but I no longer shared any sympathy for Nolde the martyred artist.  In the grand scheme of things, the fact that the card carrying Nazi Emil Nolde was banned from painting - is small beans compared to the genocide of the Jews and extermination of gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally ill and political and artistic dissidents, the terror state of the Gestapo, the destruction of Europe and the sad tales of flight of other artists who refused to live in Nazi Germany and were terrified their actual lives were at risk.                                                                                      

                                                    

The last room was the least contentious with Nolde’s seascapes inspired by Turner and Nolde’s flower paintings which provided him with a pretext for the most vibrant displays of pure colour. Carol and I loved his large late oil painting Large Poppies (Red, Red, Red) from 1942. In these late, free flowing paintings Nolde achieved an inimitable mastery of his own. But overall I found Emil Nolde: Colour is Life one of the most morally depressing exhibitions I have ever seen - and I was actually very upset by it for quite a few days.                                                                                                                                  

As you know, I have been a fanatical lover of Expressionist art since my teenage years and after Ernst Ludwig Kirchner – Emil Nolde was my second favourite German Expressionist. But in the late 1980s when I started reading about Nolde - the popular books I read on him concentrated on his work from 1907-1914 and ignored his later life - apart from mentioning that when the Nazis took power they confiscated over 1,000 of his work from German museums, included him in their exhibition of Degenerate Art and stopped him from painting and exhibiting. What they failed to mention was that in later life Nolde became a rabid anti-Semite, racist, member of the Nazi party and courted its officials like Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler - who initially admired his work. The irony was that Hitler despised the Expressionists - and every attempt by Nolde to ingratiate himself with the Fascist party that he loved - ended in abject failure. Not only did Hitler and the Fascists want to re-create a Classical conception of art – they hated Modern art which they thought a con and Jewish conspiracy, they loathed non-Western art and wanted to annihilate any vestige of personal expression from art since Romanticism. So naturally, an oddball painter, lacking in most conventional academic skills like Nolde - was an anathema to them. Despite himself, Nolde was as much a Modernist painter as he was a reactionary political bigot. You would think that after being having his work confiscated from museums, after being branded a Degenerate Artist, after seeing German democracy gutted and after seeing the hell the Nazis brought to Europe - Emil Nolde would have turned against Hitler. But no. This character still supported Hitler right up to the end! After Hitler had brought death and destruction to Europe and eventually to Germany itself and Germany was defeated and Hitler was dead - Nolde underwent denazification - and successfully presented himself as a politically naïve Degenerate Artist persecuted by the Nazis. And since Germany needed to find some heroes somewhere to rescue its reputation - Expressionists persecuted by the Nazis were lauded and ushered back into German museums - and sneaking in with them, was the far from naïve, cunning old fox Emil Nolde.                 

             

As a teenager and rabid read of Catcher in the Rye, I, like Holden Caufield, loathed the hypocrisy of the world and in particular the phoney game players who always succeeded in getting to the top. I still do. I have spent my life trying to find genuine artists who were not also operators and media whores. But life teaches you that there is hardly anyone you have ever heard of that was not cunning like a fox - though the likes of Emil Nolde took it to extremes. For example, people naïvely believe that artists, writers, musicians and actors just appear on our TV - because of the indisputable quality of their artwork. But artistic quality is entirely subjective and thus the perfect vehicle for hype. So nearly every TV appearance by artistic types including so called charity work has been stage-managed by public relations agents and backed by commercial funding and the tribal support of the artistic community. And once you are somebody with financial power – you can always find people to make excuses for you - if only because they are invested in your success and they will share in your disgrace. Moreover, the general public and media machine which cares only for ratings - will usually forgive an artist everything - except failure. Nolde profited from these various laws and like artistic celebrities today, Nolde knew how to jump on every artistic, social, moral and political bandwagon going - in order to increase his profile and relevance. Initially he played up the role of the isolated Expressionist rebel unconcerned for the decadent and material world. When by 1922, he had turned himself into one of the most successful and richest artists in Germany - he played the role of the strutting master. Then he jumped on the growing Nationalism and anti-Semitism in Germany to continue his relevance, side-line the challenge of French art - and push aside those that might challenge his position. And initially he successfully courted Nazi party members like Goebbels and Himmler. He was so craven that he even denounced Max Pechstein an Expressionist rival as a Jew (he luckily wasn’t) in order to end his career! And when Nolde himself was persecuted by the Nazis and banned from painting - he managed after the war to use this - to turn himself into a martyr. You could say that he at least had the integrity to continue working in the Expressionist style that had brought him so much trouble from the Nazis – but maybe he had such a psychological, intellectual and political form of arrested development and such a paucity of conventional skills - that he had no ability to paint any differently. Besides few seventy-year-old's change the style of their lifetime. His final cunning genius was to ingratiate himself back into the German and Danish art worlds and societies - and since most of Germany had actively supported Hitler - they all had a vested interest in promoting the idea that there had been great and good German artists like the Expressionists who refused to bow to Fascist aesthetics – so Emil Nolde was pardoned by default and fêted with exhibitions throughout Europe before his death in 1956.                                                                          

Of course, separating the art of an artist from their personality, politics and sexuality is a contentious issue - especially in today’s toxic political environment. But personally, thanks to my self-destructive and obscene honesty - I have never been given the benefit of such equivocation by the art world. Traditionally artists and members of the art world jealously guard the autonomy of art against the knee-jerk bigotry of the general public - especially since the typical political agitprop of the art world is extremely left-wing. But art history constantly throws up artists who even the art world finds difficult to defend. Like Emil Nolde there were many Modernist artists, writers and intellectuals who were infatuated or complicit with Fascism including painters like Salvador Dali and Francis Picabia. There were also murderers like Caravaggio and misogynistic, sexual predators like Picasso and paedophilic fantasist painters like Schiele and Balthus. And every season, new biographies on artists we love - reveal unsavoury character traits and behaviour that make us question our admiration of their art. Yet, who amongst us is without sin?                                                                                   

I do not think that Emil Nolde was ever a truly great artist of the first rank - but to me as a lover of Expressionist art - he was an admirable one from a distance. So I thought I could make a classical defence of Nolde the artist deserving to be separated from Nolde the Nazi. However, since Nolde was not only a reactionary religious bigot, racist, anti-Semite and Nazi - but also an inherently phoney conman who got away with it – I can’t.              

                                             

So I want to make another kind of point. In today’s political climate, there is an ongoing threat to free-speech and practice of no platforming individuals whose opinions and lives we oppose. But we cannot reduce art history to a list of the most blameless, if only because - artists by nature are often selfish even sociopathic creatures whose lack of concern for conventional morality - is married to formal originality. Thus, much of the best art ever made - was produced by the kind of obnoxious people - you wouldn’t want to deal with personally. More importantly, we cannot censor history according to our own contemporary present day moirés. Because the most fascinating thing about history is that it is another world, long since passed - that is often a complete contradiction of ours - but which we can learn from!              

Fundamental to art history and history in general is truth - and what we choose to do with that truth. Those that seek to alter that truth or hide it (like those historians that tried to hide or downplay the complicity of artists like Nolde with the Nazis or those that would seek to ban exhibitions of Nolde’s work now) - are the true enemies of art and history, civilisation and humanity. Because we never know when and where a lesson is going to be imparted. I have studied World War Two, the Holocaust, and the Nazis since childhood and I thought I had understood the nature of German anti-Semitism, racism and bigotry. But looking only at the monsters of Fascism can have a dulling and predictable effect. Of course they would behave so dreadfully - they were sadistic sociopaths! Far more troubling, is the story of those that we might admire artistically - who sympathised or collaborated with the evils of Fascism. One of the constant slurs against Expressionism from Marxist critics is that it heralded Fascism, but for me blaming any artists in the 1910s for what emerged politically in the 1930s is grossly unfair. However, with an artist like Nolde who was admired by the likes of Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler, Marxists do indeed have a prima facie case.                                                                                              

Looking at the Expressionist paintings by Nolde - I was taken off guard. I loved the myth of Nolde the Expressionist rebel, I adored the immediacy of his style and his volcanic colour - so I felt at home formally with him. Moreover, seeing previously only a handful of Nolde’s landscapes and still-life’s in the flesh and looking at most of his figure paintings in reproduction gave me a false idea of the man. Not only do reproductions of artworks give one a false sense of scale, touch and texture – they abstract and anonymise the character of such works - making real humanistic interpretation impossible. Seeing Nolde’s work in quantity in the flesh – I was stabbed in my heart by Nolde’s Aryan pride, Nationalistic bigotry, religious sanctimony, crude anti-Semitism and racial stereotyping. It felt like going to meet a beloved hero hoping for an enjoyable chat about art - only to be assaulted by a bigoted and racist rant - which left me wondering if I had ever really known them and feeling disgusted. But I had learned a valuable lesson.