Lot 103 D

In this frontally composed portrait of a young woman, Emil Nolde ignites a firework display of expressive colour. The narrow face and the long, slender neck are laid down in transparent shades of green, which stand in complementary contrast to the brightly and boldly red lips and the summarily applied purplish-red background; the luminous cobalt blue of the eyes is also found in the shadow of the right half of the face.
Nolde has masterfully utilised a palette of colours that operates unrestricted by local colour. “In extreme haste, he begins to paint. Click, he throws back the first brush; click, the second. Without interruption and quick as lightning, he handles the different brushes. […] He never looks at the pots of paint; he knows them like a musician knows his keys,” is how one eyewitness described his painting process a few years later (cited in: Nils Ohlsen, in: Emil Nolde. Glühender Farbenrausch. Aquarelle, Tusche- und Kreidezeichnungen, Cologne 2018, p. 23). In his search for the inner expressive content of a portrait, the artist achieved a penetrating characterisation of the individual through colour alone, and in the present work this has been intensified into a positively dramatic statement.