Emil Nolde - Sommerblumen - image-1

Lot 342 D

Emil Nolde - Sommerblumen

Auction 1099 - overview Cologne
01.12.2017, 18:00 - Modern Art
Estimate: 60.000 € - 80.000 €
Result: 99.200 € (incl. premium)

Emil Nolde

Sommerblumen
Circa 1930/1935

Watercolour on Japan paper 22.8 x 27.4 cm Framed under glass. Signed 'Nolde.' in black lower right. - The upper margin with few minor paper defects. Vibrant colours.

“I was once again mostly painting the little flower gardens. They are so dear to me, these bright and joyfully luminous colours. Those are still and pleasant hours, walking and sitting there between the sweet-smelling and blooming flowers on peaceful summer days. I would very much like for my pictures to convey something of this beauty. I myself, of course, experience this feeling before the pictures. That first beautiful happiness …” wrote Emil Nolde in the autumn of 1908 to Gustav Schiefler (cited in Martin Urban, Emil Nolde - Blumen und Tiere. Aquarelle und Zeichnungen, Cologne 1980, p. 7). In the second half of the 1910s, on the island of Als, Nolde created his earliest garden paintings. It would take ten more years for him to find his way to that form of floral watercolour which thereafter shaped his oeuvre in an almost uninterrupted series.
Dahlias, bellflowers, irises, lilies, poppies and sunflowers - as Nolde had already done on Als, in later years he also sought the source material for his art primarily in the direct vicinity of his homes and studios on Utenwarf and in Seebüll. Nolde's garden on Utenwarf was already impressive, but in Seebüll the flowers grew in even greater abundance and diversity. The artist experienced his later floral watercolours as “deeper, more grandly conceived and more melancholically sated” (ibid., p. 34), and it is precisely this powerful quality which also distinguishes our work.

Certificate

With a photo-certificate by Martin Urban, Seebüll, dated 15 February 1989.

Provenance

Wolfgang Wittrock Kunsthandel, Düsseldorf (1991); Private collection, Rhineland