Emil Nolde: Who He Was and His Expressionist Paintings

Emil Nolde the painter: who he was

Emil Nolde was born with the surname Hansen in 1867, in the village of Nolde in Schleswig, a region fought over by Denmark and Germany. He took his artist’s name from his birthplace only in 1902, by which point he had already spent thirty years finding his way. Painting came after wood: starting in 1884 he spent four years apprenticed as a carver and furniture designer in several factories, his first real contact with artistic work. In the years that followed he studied at the School of Applied Arts in Karlsruhe, between 1889 and 1890, and later with the painter Adolf Hölzel at the school in Neu-Dachau, near Munich.

The Die Brücke years and the break

In February 1906 Karl Schmidt-Rottluff invited him to join Die Brücke, the group that had launched German Expressionism. Nolde accepted, but the arrangement did not last: in November 1907 he told the group he was leaving, after less than two years. From then on he worked alone, without looking for a collective language again.

Emil Nolde’s watercolor paintings and flowers

Between 1909 and 1910 Nolde found the voice that would make him recognizable, built on saturated color and broad brushwork. Flowers became a subject he returned to for the rest of his life, mostly in watercolor, a technique that let him work quickly and let the color spread on its own across the paper.

Practical example: to see the two sides of Nolde’s work, compare one of his flower watercolors, where the colors blend at the edges with no sharp outline, to one of his oil paintings on a religious subject, where the figures carry an almost caricature-like dramatic force.

From 1909 Nolde also turned increasingly to biblical subjects.

Emil Nolde’s paintings and artwork: the key works

This religious phase produced some of the best-known paintings by Emil Nolde: Pentecost, The Last Supper and Mockery, all made from 1909 onward. A few years later, during his 1913-1914 expedition to the South Pacific, Nolde shifted subject for a time and made numerous watercolor portraits of the people he met along the way.

Degenerate art: the Nazi campaign against Nolde

According to Tate, in 1937 the Nazis declared Nolde a “degenerate” artist and removed all of his works from German museums. According to the University of Cambridge, the propaganda exhibition “Degenerate Art,” which opened in Munich in July 1937, included 33 works by Nolde out of a total of 650 by 112 artists. That same year, across Germany, museums removed 1,052 of his works, more than from any other artist caught up in the campaign. In 1941 an order forbade him from buying canvas and paint, and in August of that year he was expelled from the Reich Chamber of Visual Arts, which amounted to a final ban on painting and selling his work. Nolde kept working regardless, making watercolors away from view at his home in Seebüll.

Nolde and Nazism: a more complicated story

This is where Nolde’s biography stops being straightforward. Holding Danish citizenship since 1920, he joined the NSAN, the National Socialist Association of Northern Schleswig, in late summer 1934 — years before he himself became a target of the regime’s cultural crackdown. Historians cited by the University of Cambridge document that he came to see himself as both a victim and the leading opponent of a supposed “Jewish dominance” in the German art world, an antisemitic position. Despite the persecution his art suffered, he and his wife Ada kept expressing sympathy for the regime.

After 1945 a different story took hold in Germany: that of a victim-painter who had resisted Nazism by secretly painting his watercolors, the so-called “unpainted pictures.” Historians cited by the University of Cambridge call that narrative a myth built after the war: the persecution targeted Nolde’s style, judged at odds with the regime’s artistic doctrine, while his political convictions stayed close to those of his persecutors. It is an episode that belongs to the wider story of German culture swept up first by Nazism and then by World War 2, the same context in which other figures on the German cultural scene, such as the Nobel laureate Gerhart Hauptmann, had to find their own way of dealing with Nazi power.