Lot 270 D

“I, too, lived entirely in painting and - even if it was not much - with the nature going on around us, the animals, the plants, the high, still, white clouds” (Emil Nolde, Jahre der Kämpfe: 1902-1914, Flensburg 1958, p. 23).
For Nolde landscape and clouds meant earth and sky, world and cosmos: the outward experience of an overwhelming nature and its inward experience all at once. His landscapes and seascapes affect their viewers with an overwhelming accord of colours, the contrast and harmony of luminous tones. Nolde grasps the “Vormittagswolken” in terms of a clear triad consisting of blue, green and a whitish grey, thus creating a work that simultaneously displays a powerfully evocative expressiveness and a cool freshness. The nearby sea can be intuited directly from the tonality of the massive cloud formation before a blue sky above the lushly green plain. Here it becomes palpable to a degree found in only a few of Nolde's depictions of the broad, wind-shaped landscape of his home. As empty as it may sometimes appear, it nevertheless has nothing monotonous about it; instead, its atmosphere changes constantly in terms of light and colour. Here, where the landscape provides a stage for Nolde, the sky and clouds are the actors: “On the flat land they are the dread of weak natures and, for the strong, an experience of drama and nature's grandeur every time.” (ibid., pp. 110 f.).
Nolde's watercolour was created around 1925; in the cloud formation and suggested ditches it exhibits a very precise and almost symmetrical composition. Nolde formulates the cumulus clouds with subtle volumes and generates an astounding sense of depth through their layering. He did not move from Utenwarf to the nearby Seebüll until 1927, where his new house and studio would be built over the course of the following years. The draining of the here depicted Wiedau lowlands near Utenwarf at the lake Ruttebüll was begun in these years - this intrusion into the primeval landscape moved Nolde in many respects.