Lot 41 D

In 1916, when Emil Nolde moved into his recently purchased farmhouse Utenwarf, it prompted the creation of a great number of landscape pictures. At that same time, however, he also began to create numerous watercolours, whose origin lies in the garden he personally laid out. With a great love of detail, Emil and Ada Nolde planted their garden with red poppies, sunflowers, dahlias, irises, arum lilies and lilies. Over the course of a year, flowers were repeatedly to be found in full bloom, and these then found their way into his watercolours.
In contrast to Karl Schmidt-Rottluff or Gabriele Münter, who usually painted their flowers in a vase, Nolde seems to have captured them directly in his garden. Like the watercolour “Roter Mohn”, he painted them in an extreme close-up as he found them in the flower bed – perhaps while sitting on a stool. What interested Nolde here is not the withering of a flower and the associated theme of transience: as a rule he selected flowers in full bloom. Using a watercolour brush soaked with colour he has traced the individual, luminously red petals of the flower, suggesting the dark depth of its receptacle and consciously accepting that the colours and close-up would lead to blurring. Indeed, he has used the thin consistency of the watercolours to also suggest the transparency of a few petals. As Nils Ohlsen has written, in discovering his garden, Nolde once again displayed a resemblance to his Norwegian colleague Edvard Munch, who moved into a plant nursery near Oslo in 1916 (exh. cat. Nolde Stiftung Seebüll 2018, p. 29).