Lot 252 D

Emil Nolde's chromatic fantasies attain what is perhaps their greatest possible freedom in his flower paintings. Here the painter was able to realise his artistic ideas with an extremely high degree of abstraction without having to simultaneously give up that link to nature which always remained the foundation of his work. Even if the subject of these images remained the same over the years, each is nonetheless entirely different in expressive terms. Sunflowers, poppies, irises, purple coneflowers or asters - Nolde's flowers embody not so much botanical studies as individual beings, characters and moods.
With its spontaneous cropping and the shifting of the flowers away from the centre, the composition of our watercolour is reminiscent of a photographic snapshot. Like a gaze towards the sky, the sunflower - unquestionably of particular prominence in Noldes oeuvre - soars up steeply along the right edge of the sheet to rise above the luminous asters, and it finds its expertly composed counterweight in the light blue of the sheet's left edge. Through the vertical format that Nolde selected for this grand watercolour, he was able to once again underscore the portrait-like element of this image.