Lot 11 D

“Dualisms were provided a great deal of room in my pictures and also in my graphic works. With or against one another: man and woman, pleasure and pain, deity and devil. The colours were also opposed to each other: cold and warm, light and dark, weak and bold. Usually, however, after one colour or colour harmony had been sounded – as though it were a matter of course – one colour defined the other, feeling the way through the palette’s entire splendid sequence of colours entirely on the basis of emotion and without a thought, in pure sensual surrender and the joy of giving form […] Colours living a life of their own, crying, laughing, dream and happiness, hot and holy, like love songs and eroticism, like chants and chorales! Colours oscillating in the timbre of silver and bronze bells, heralding happiness, passion and love, blood and death,” writes Nolde regarding the years he spent in Arolsen and Berlin from 1911 to 1913 (cited in idem, Mein Leben, Köln 1976, p. 205).
Surveying Nolde’s work as a painter, his strong interest in depicting sculpture stands out: statues of the Madonna, sculptures and masks from Oceania and by Native Americans, statues of Buddha and faience works. In this context he took advantage both of his own collections and, from 1911, increasingly those of Berlin’s ethnological museum as well; Nolde had rented a flat and studio in Berlin during those years and primarily spent the winter months there.
“When winter came again I stood, following an inner urge, in the Egyptian and Coptic sections of the museums; I went to the Tanagras and to the Romanesque and Gothic statues, always drawing all of these rich forms and also colours. – This provided a more profound penetration into the essential than mechanical images and reproductions do, even if my drawings were only very cursory. – In my later still lifes, which were often painted freely, several of these object-based perceptions make their return” (ibid., p. 223).
Thus, on the one hand, artefacts are arranged into still lifes and, on the other, these same objects find their way into his world of motifs and inspire him to an extremely expressionistic realisation of, for example, historical themes from the Bible, featuring subjects such as the nine-part cycle on the “Leben Christi” (Urban 421-423, 477-482), or also from Nordic mythology, such as “Mann und Weibchen” or “Kerzentänzerinnen” – characteristic figures featuring bizarre and striking physiognomies in ecstatic movement and bold tonality (see Urban 515 and 512). While his fellow artists from the Brücke group or also those in Paris were dedicating their attention more to non-Western, or specifically African sculpture, Nolde was also searching for the distinctive, interesting and also the foreign element in European sacred sculpture.
In the still life “Kirchenfiguren II” the figure of an apostle – the book may identify him as Matthew – and the kneeling donor figure depicting a king’s daughter from a medieval group centred around St George have been made the same size and united together. Both wooden sculptures – as well as a Madonna with a saint which Nolde depicted in his painting “Kirchenfiguren I” (see Urban 549) – were exhibited in Kiel’s Thaulow ethnological museum, which was later destroyed, and they are now to be found in Schloss Gottorf in Schleswig. The two preparatory drawings in the Nolde-Stiftung Seebüll show the apostle and the princess as individual figures. In the large-format painting, on the other hand, they fill the blue space of the picture, which has been painted in with broad brushstrokes and without further detail (surely a Marian allusion) – harmoniously united, they gaze with mild seriousness at the viewer opposite them. The gesture of intercession thus no longer applies to the original situation from which Nolde had taken it and is instead addressed directly to the viewer.
The “still life” is rare on account of its large size; it was already presented at important exhibitions early on and is from the famous Sprengel collection of Hanover.