Nolde, Emil

orig. Emil Hansen

(born Aug. 7, 1867, Nolde, near Bocholt, Ger.—died April 15, 1956, Seebüll, near Niebüll, W.Ger.) German Expressionist painter, printmaker, and watercolourist. Born to a peasant family, he carved wood for a living and came late to painting. Though briefly a member of Die Br (1906–07), he was essentially a solitary painter. Fervently religious and racked by a sense of sin, he created such works as Dance Around the Golden Calf (1910), in which the figures' erotic frenzy and demonic faces are rendered with deliberately crude draftsmanship and dissonant colours. On an ethnological expedition to the East Indies (1913–14), he was impressed by the power of the art he saw there. Back in Europe, he produced brooding landscapes (e.g., Marsh Landscape, 1916) and colourful flowers. As a printmaker he was noted especially for the stark black-and-white effect of his crudely incised woodcuts. Although he was an early advocate of Germany's National Socialist Party, the party declared his art “degenerate” and forbade him to paint. His late, postwar works reveal his disillusionment.

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