Lot 32 D

The important colour lithograph “Junges Paar” is one of the largest-format sheets that Emil Nolde created during his entire career. It was made in 1913, before the outbreak of World War I. That year was defined by Nolde’s preparations for his voyage to the South Pacific and his purchase of the farmhouse in Tønder. Until that time, Nolde and his wife Ada’s lives had been centred around the metropolis of Berlin where, that year, he created a series of paintings, watercolours and graphic works whose theme is the ambivalent nature of the urban life of the cafes and on the streets. Nolde describes the extent to which he felt drawn to the excesses of the big city in his autobiographical “Jahre der Kämpfe”: “Every evening at eleven, I put on my dark trousers as well as my black dress coat from St Gallen, which had soon become a historical piece. My Ada likewise put on her best dress, and we went to masked balls, to the cabarets, to the Ice Palace. And then it was on to the pubs where, pale as powder and with a corpse-like smell, impotent asphalt lions and hectic ladies of the demi-monde sat in their elegantly audacious gowns. […] I drew this flip side of life, with its make-up, its slippery filth and decay” (cited from: Emil Nolde, Jahre der Kämpfe 1902 – 1914, Flensburg 1958, pp. 139f.).
This tensely charged depiction of a young couple was presumably also created in this context. Appearing before an undefined background, we find a man in a black dress coat on the left and, on the right, a dark-haired woman wearing a patterned evening gown or kimono. With a derisive grin he roughly holds the woman by her wrist – she reacts with an appalled look and an attempt to release herself from his grip. Because at no point in his career was Nolde ever a painter of likenesses in a traditional sense, what interests him in the case of this constellation is the fundamental tension between the sexes, their feelings of desire, violence and fear. The palette consisting of a pale greyish violet, black and a lurid lemon yellow also corresponds to the sheet’s aggressive undertone. Nolde evidently occupied himself intensively with this outstanding lithograph, because it exists in many different colorations, with only a few impressions printed of each.