Lot 23 D

Two figures in his typical wet-on-wet painting technique on delicate Japan paper with highlights created by means of deliberately applied lines of gouache: in this brilliant double likeness Nolde has successfully developed movement, devotion and intensity in equal degrees. The dark blue field of colour reveals itself to be a male figure with grotesque, exaggerated facial features. His broad, almost diabolical grin is directed towards a female figure whose colour veritably merges her together with the flat surface of the background. She turns away, her body and facial features producing an angular effect.
Created in the mid-1930s, after the move to Seebüll, this work comes from the series of so-called “Phantasien”, which repeatedly formed a part of Emil Nolde’s oeuvre from 1931 to 1935. Common to all these watercolours is the way they emerge out of the brushwork and the way the depicted figures take on form through the colours’ contours. Often borrowed from the world of sagas or mythology, the grotesques created here however cannot be associated with any specific fairy tale or myth: “In reality, of these many supernatural and half-divine beings, none live on our Earth, but mankind has been given the ability to creatively and symbolically form them” (from: Emil Nolde, Mein Leben, Cologne 1976, p. 331).