Emil Nolde
Sonnenblumen
Circa 1920/1925
Watercolour on light Japan paper 27.7 x 21.9 cm Framed under glass. Signed 'Nolde' in pencil upper right. - The paper slightly browned. A minute marginal tear in the minimally irregularly cut paper to the left.
“It was on Als, in the middle of the summer. The colours of the flowers irresistibly drew me to them and - almost suddenly - I was painting. My first little garden paintings were created. 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, sagging, withering, ending up tossed aside in the ditch.” (Emil Nolde, Jahre der Kämpfe, Flensburg 1958, p. 95).
Flowers provided Emil Nolde with the courage to bring the luminous colours of the world into his paintings without constraint. When the artist writes about the spontaneous, fulfilling experience of blooming colours - while nonetheless immediately bringing up the topos of becoming and decline and thus, with a melancholy gravity, making them a symbol of the fate of humanity - this reveals above all the metaphysical as well as spiritual qualities which he saw inscribed within nature and flowers. In the mid-1920s it began to become clear to Nolde that he would soon be leaving Utenwarf for a variety of reasons; in 1926 he would move from there to Seebüll with his wife Ada. This meant a farewell, but in this case it again simultaneously brought a new beginning.
Certificate
With a photo-certificate by Manfred Reuther, Seebüll, dated 18 June 2014.
Provenance
Private possession, Rhineland