Lot 82 D

The watchful eye of the artistic avant-gardes of the early 20th century not only discovered the art and culture of unfamiliar peoples and ethnic groups, but also developed a self-assured revolutionary gesture in their attitude towards them, calling into question all the previously established forms and ideals which had shaped and appeared sacred to the society of the educated European bourgeoisie. Emil Nolde's expanded interest in artefacts that seemed primitive, far-off and exotic - which he had developed by drawing in Berlin's museums and would later also collect personally - had already been stirred before 1900:
“The art of the Egyptians and Assyrians stood before me as something exceptional, like a mysticism. I could not evaluate them solely as 'historical' objects, as was almost universally done at that time: I loved these great works, even if it seemed as if I was not allowed. But sometimes a love like this burns the hottest. - The following decade brought insight and liberation; I became familiar with Indian, Chinese and Persian art, the primitive and strange products of the Mexicans and indigenous peoples. For me these were not just 'curiosities', as the experts called them. No, we elevated them to the level of that which they are: the strange, austere folk and primal art of primitive peoples.” (Emil Nolde, cited in: Karsten Müller, op. cit., p. 66).
Ada and Emil Nolde's 1913/1914 journey as part of the “medical-demographic German-New-Guinea expedition”, which was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I, is well known to have lastingly deepened the impressions the artist had already gathered earlier as well as his convictions, which were thoroughly critical at that time. Nolde began to decisively and sustainedly emphasise alien objects of world art in his painting and bring them to life in his own way. His interpretation was carried out not through reshaping, remoulding and stylistic transformation but through assimilation and integration into his own pictorial worlds. He then very much liked to maintain a frontal, dual structure in his compositions, as is also the case in this watercolour, where he has placed a small, archaic figure of a rider made out of clay (probably Cypriot, from the first millennium before Christ and from his collection) next to a tropically blooming plant. In this way he has achieved a subtle animation and mutual intensification of the depicted objects, whose character is recorded in an unadulterated and direct manner, on a level experienced in purely artistic terms and capable of harmoniously bringing together heterogeneous elements. And this took place in ever new pictorial variations in Nolde's oeuvre and in a formally interesting as well as expressive manner.