A week before quarantine I hung up one of my favorite paintings: Ruffled Autumn Clouds by Emil Nolde. A German-Danish painter, Nolde is known for his exploration of color at the beginning of expressionism.
In college I studied expressionism and how the great German expressionists shook Adolf Hitler to his core. Expressionism in the early 20th century attempted to depict the inner feelings of the artists rather than the realistic world around them. Just after naturalism, a true-to-life style, you could imagine how the rebellious artists of expressionists rattled the world. It was different! Exciting! Scary!
Hitler, in the height of his power, despised this artwork. Expressionist art enables people to express their feelings and to share their individuality and deepest perspectives. Hitler didn’t want individual thinking; he wanted to control the narrative of society. He wanted to control thinking.
In reaction to this movement Hitler named expressionism degenerate—art that reverted Germans to a simple, less functional, disorganized people. In 1937 he created the Degenerate Art Exhibition showcasing various artists and their work that was deemed anti-German. Here are some of the works included in the exhibition:
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Street, Berlin. 1913
Henri Matisse’s The Blue Window. 1913. While the exhibition mainly emphasized German artwork, the Nazis also highlighted modernist artwork. Matisse’s painting had been in the Folkwang Museum in Essen.
Paul Klee’s Around the Fish. 1926
But no other artist had as many of their paintings showcased in the exhibition as Emil Nolde.
Emil Nolde’s Prophet. 1912
Emil Nolde’s Alice. 1907
Emil Nolde’s Kerzentänzerinnen. 1917
In 1941, the Nazis banned Nolde from painting. But he began his series of the unpainted pictures, a series of small watercolor paintings created in the seclusion of his home in Seebuell, Germany where they could be easily concealed.
For the last decades Emil Nolde has been mainly portrayed as a victim of artistic prejudice and a heroic defier of censorship in the Nazi era. But for anyone trying to pin down who is right, wrong, evil, or good, the challenge is blurred in Nolde’s story; Nolde was a Nazi. He praised Hitler. He supported eugenics. In his autobiography titled “Jahre der Kämpfe” (note: he used the plural word for “Kampf” in his own autobiography, emulating Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”) Nolde said, “Some people have the urgent wish that everything—humans, art, culture—could be integrated, in which case human society across the globe would consist of mutts, bastards, and mulattos.”
Art set him apart from the Nazis. He believed his artwork showed the epitome of true Germanness.
In 2019 a Berlin exhibit shared even more of his contributions to anti-Semitism, causing Angela Merkel to remove Nolde’s paintings from her office. I question whether I should have a painting of his in my home. When I tell people about the piece of art, I tell them both sides of Emil Nolde: his rebellion against Nazi oppression as it relates to art and expressionism and his racist perspectives and aggressions towards Jews.
Is there a way to honor someone’s artistic contributions to the world and still actively denounce their contributions to racism, xenophobia, and a mass genocide? I don’t know how I feel about this art piece hanging in my wall anymore. But there is beauty in this tension.
Bernhard Fulda, a Cambridge historian and author of “Emil Nolde: The Artist during the Third Reich,” said, “We don’t pass any judgment in that regard. We don’t say, ‘This is what you should do with this cultural context.’ We tell art lovers: ‘Deal with it—now you figure out how this new knowledge frames the artworks of Nolde that you’re seeing.’”
I’m dealing with it. I’m trying to figure it out.
