Exhibitions about Emil Nolde in Hamburg: Chance missed – culture

In the Galerie der Gegenwart at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, a retrospective on the Czech painter Toyen is currently honoring an artist who lived in constant fear of death during the six-year occupation of Prague by Nazi Germany. At the same time, in a hall in the old building, the museum presents in great detail the painting technique of an artist who joined the NSDAP in 1934, drafted a “de-Judaism plan” for Germany without being asked, and argued in the last months of the war that world Jewry was caused by the death of German soldiers is to blame. This fanatical Nazi, Emil Nolde, is also in the Bucerius-Kunst-Forum, the exhibition hall of the TimeFoundation, a large show dedicated to his artistic discovery phase in Copenhagen around 1901.

This exhibition focus on Nolde in Hamburg now inevitably raises the question of whether the discovery of his fascist and anti-Semitic worldview, which was brought about two years ago by the major scientific exhibition by Aya Soika and Bernhard Fulda, “Emil Nolde – A German Legend” in Berlin, has been fully accomplished, has already been forgotten? Are Nolde’s tireless attempts to become a state artist in Nazi Germany, to stylize himself as a lifelong fighter against the influence of the Jews in art, as easily ignorable as in the post-war decades, when the entire art business Nolde’s strategically generated cover-up myth of the brutally persecuted artist repeated?

“Even more than an ardent Hitler admirer, Nolde was an ardent Nolde admirer”

The announcements of the two exhibitions to deal with purely artistic aspects of Nolde seem like an invitation to put the moral club back in the evidence room in order to finally celebrate Nolde as a “genius” again. But Kathrin Baumstark, director of the Bucerius Art Forum and curator of the large exhibition “Nolde and the North” since 2019, “vigorously” contradicts this. The attempt made for the first time to examine Nolde’s artistic development for its influences through Danish painting at the turn of the century, pursued the goal of correcting the genius status that Nolde always propagated for himself.

“Even more than an ardent Hitler admirer, Nolde was an ardent Nolde admirer,” says Baumstark about the reasons for his egomania. All his life the painter knitted personality myths about himself as a “purely German” genius who remained free from bad influences, especially Jewish and French. But it has been known for a long time that Nolde was by no means the self-made Germanic art solitaire, for example with regard to his inspiration from Van Gogh. This didactically convincing exhibition shows that early in his career Nolde dealt with the impressionistic Danish genre painting of bourgeois city life in image composition and coloring, which in turn has its roots in the golden age of Dutch painting.

From Jan Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch to the Danish house scenes by Vilhelm Hammershøi, Viggo Johansen, Anna Ancher and Georg Achen, a direct line leads to Nolde’s first portraits and his own genre scenes as expressive color compositions. Whereby – if you want to appreciate it free of all biographical concerns – the selection from Nolde’s early work clearly shows how diverse his first attempts at finding a style of his own from art history were. From diffuse seascapes, reminiscent of William Turner’s veiled painting, to harbor scenes in the style of Monet, he stylistically works openly on other geniuses.

Now Nolde’s politically harmless early work is an ideal pretext to assert the false separation between artist and art with which Nolde was so successfully maneuvered through art history until 2019, although what he was really thinking has been known since the end of the war. After all, he had trumpeted it clearly to the world in his autobiography “Years of Struggle” from 1934. But even with the knowledge that Nolde was by no means just a victim of the Third Reich, but his loyal supporter, his art was always acquitted of political burdens. And “Nolde and the North” does not entirely escape this mistake.

In the beginning it is clearly stated that Emil Nolde and his wife Ada, whom he met in Copenhagen, were Nazis and stayed despite the rejection by the Nazi state. But the convincingly successful proof in the Berlin show that Nolde’s painting and his ideological premises do have strong points of contact is not pursued here, with the exception of one point. In a Viking picture from 1940 there is a note that he “possibly” wanted to prove that he was “compatible” with the Nazi regime.

This exhibition will not be more explicit because, according to Kathrin Baumstark, she “trusts its mature visitors a lot” and does not want to put an explanation under each picture. Especially since a lot was discussed in the accompanying program of the exhibition about Nolde’s problematic relations with the Hitler state, for example through a specially set up feedback platform or in discussions with experts such as the journalist Stefan Koldehoff, who had reported on Nolde’s brown character years ago. But with this relocation to the supporting program, the exhibition misses the chance to put Nolde’s early pictures into the context of his worldview. For it was not only in the Third Reich that it was shaped by Germanness, closeness to the earth and loyalty to home, i.e. by folk stereotypes that were as important for Nolde’s art as for the development of a nationalist ideology that he later enthusiastically accepted.

The suspicion of a new variant of the Nolde fining by his foundation is not very plausible

Naming such connections between consciousness and Nolde’s artistic expression is not at all interested in the Kunsthalle exhibition, “I mostly base with chalk …”. Contextualization does not take place anywhere with this technical expertise on painting backgrounds, preliminary drawings and unmixed colors – apart from a wall reference to the very good critical one Arte film about Emil Nolde by Anna Maria Tappeiner, “Art and Calculus”. Kunsthallen director Alexander Klar justifies this extreme narrowing of the view with the purely technical perspective of his cabinet show, but promises that the context between art and biography will be dealt with in a programmatic way when Modernism 2023 is relaunched. Until then, visitors have to do their own research.

The sudden Nolde focus with apparently unproblematic topics could of course also raise the suspicion that the Nolde Foundation in Seebüll plays a role, especially when one looks at the past of this institution, which was initiated by the artist himself, in the decades of systematic cover-up of critical material Nolde knows. And in fact, the foundation is not only directly involved as an extensive lender. The Kunsthallen exhibition is a cooperation with Seebüll. And the TimeFoundation, which maintains the art forum, is co-financing the digital recording of the Nolde archive in the far north of Germany.

However, since Christian Ring took office as director in 2013, the company’s policy has switched to absolute transparency. The Berlin exhibition “A German Legend” was only possible in its evidential value because Aya Soika and Bernhard Fulda had the first uncensored look at all sources. And this insight should now also be made possible for all other researchers with digitization. The suspicion of a new variant of the Nolde fining by his foundation is therefore not very plausible. That is why the Hamburg houses have to ask themselves whether, with their thematic setting and the lack of contextualization, they have not continued to knit the legend of Emil Nolde as a brilliant German great artist.

Nolde and the North; Bucerius-Kunst-Forum Hamburg, until January 23, 2022; Catalog: Hirmer-Verlag, Munich, 220 pages, 39.90 euros

“Most of the time I prime with chalk …”; Kunsthalle Hamburg, until April 18, 2022