Lot 330 D

This late little floral watercolour is captivating on account of the picturesque density and materiality of the paint, which still tends to call to mind the technique of the small-format works on paper created during the war years, the famous “Ungemalte Bilder”. In fact Nolde had already created close-up, expressive images of this kind early on in a different medium - in his oil paintings, in which flowers and blossoms appear in the form of genuine explosions of colour, packed together in the flower bed and as though transformed. In the summer of 1907, during his first more intensive contact with the painters of the “Brücke”, he created exquisite garden motifs on Alsen. As though intoxicated with colour, Nolde grouped and bundled together the different species into what are practically bouquets in the form of a picture and summarily characterised the different plants through their intensely coloured, luminous and light-filled blossoms. By contrast, the surrounding space or the green of their foliage and stalks play a more or less secondary, reserved and - at most - accompanying role.
Here three to four blossoms are set diagonally in yellow and orange tones, as though in a chromatic sequence. With their flowers turned frontally towards the viewer, they fill the picture plane and define the composition. Complementary tones of blue and violet generate a mysterious atmosphere among the fluid contours of the additional blossoms that blur together in the background.
While in fact the “Ungemalte Bilder” apparently do not include any known floral pieces, the flower paintings and watercolours re-emerged with all the more intensity after 1945 (cf. Martin Urban, Emil Nolde Blumen und Tiere, Aquarelle und Zeichnungen, Cologne 1979, p. 42).