Emil Nolde - Dahlien und Sonnenhut - image-1

Lot 266 D

Emil Nolde - Dahlien und Sonnenhut

Auction 1110 - overview Cologne
01.06.2018, 17:00 - Modern Art
Estimate: 100.000 € - 120.000 €
Result: 85.610 € (incl. premium)

Emil Nolde

Dahlien und Sonnenhut
Circa 1930/1940

Watercolour on Japan paper 35 x 45.7 cm Framed under glass. Signed 'Nolde' in brush and India ink lower right. - Very vibrant colours. Unobtrusively retouched corner upper left. Few very weak specks of foxing.

Seemingly spontaneously recorded in front of the flower bed, the flowers appear to wish to outdo one another in their abundance and push their way into the foreground, each flower struggling to win the viewer's favour. The compact flower of the dahlia seems to capture the blazing late-summer sun; it is crowned by prancing coneflowers and thus finds its airy culmination towards the upper edge of the sheet.
According to Nolde himself, the splendid colours of his own garden drew him irresistibly: “The blooming colours of the flowers and the purity of these colours, I loved them. I loved the flowers in their fate: sprouting up, blooming, luminously glowing, bringing happiness, sagging, withering, ending up tossed aside in the ditch.” (Emil Nolde, Jahre der Kämpfe: 1902-1914, Flensburg n.d., 2nd ed., p. 95).
Beginning in 1906 with his garden on Als, this theme would never cease to captivate him; the painter pursued the luxuriant composition of his garden and its pictorial “harvest” until the end of his life in Seebüll. With his floral paintings, he created timeless classics.
The flower watercolour offered here after around 80 years in private hands is from the collection of the well-known cultural philosopher and writer Carl Oskar Jatho and his wife. In the 1920s, in the living room of his home in Cologne, Jatho led a salon where artists and intellectuals met, and a close friendship linked him with the “Kölner Progressiven” (Cologne Progressives), among others.

Certificate

With a photo-certificate from Manfred Reuther, Risum-Lindholm, dated 14 April 2018
The watercolour is registered and documented in the archive under the number "Nolde A-80/2018".

Provenance

Käthe and Carl Oskar Jatho, Cologne (1940er Jahre); in family possession since, Rhineland