The Music of Color

For German Expressionist Emil Nolde, colors had a life of their own: "Weeping and laughing, hot and holy, like love songs and eroticism, like chants and magnificent chorales. Vibrating, they peal like silver bells and clang like bronze bells, proclaiming happiness, passion and love, soul, blood and death." The "sweetness, often sugariness" of Renoir and Monet was not to his harsher taste, and he complained bitterly in the years before World War II that "their art, because it meets popular taste, is elected darling of the world."

Today popular taste is fast catching up to the harsh bite and passion of Germany's most mystical modern painter. A month-long show of 244 Nolde works in Brussels this spring drew 4,600 viewers, despite one critical comment that his colors are too "grating and jazzy for Flemish eyes." Last week a seven-week exhibition of Nolde's work opened in Hannover to critical acclaim. Long neglected, Nolde's restless watercolors and agitated oils are now bringing record prices, reflecting his new popular ascendancy as one of the best of the German expressionists.

"A German Artist." Nolde himself would have scorned such a simple pigeonhole. "Intellectuals and literati call me an expressionist," he once exploded. "I do not like this narrow classification. A German artist, that I am." Born Emil Hansen in the north Schleswig village of Nolde (he did not change his name until he married, at 34, in 1901), he identified himself with the bleak environment of north Germany, acquiring an outer taciturnity and an inner turbulence shared by those other brooding giants of the north: Norwegian Edvard Munch and Belgian Recluse James Ensor. As a peasant lad, Nolde was early given to hallucinations. By night, "the cracks in the peeling walls became faces and fantastic shapes." By day, he imagined raging storms racing across the flat meadowland near the North Sea.

Gripped by a powerful, primitive religious fervor, he saw writhing spirits in clouds and flowers, stones and branches, was "tormented with their demands that I paint them."

"Earthly Daemon." Paint them he did, with a vehemence and crash of color that soon won him the esteem of fellow painters. He was invited to join Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and others in a group of younger revolutionary artists called die Bruecke (the Bridge), who had set up shop in 1905 in an empty Dresden butcher's store. A loner by instinct, he quit them after a year and a half, afraid that togetherness would dilute his grim, self-imposed sense of artistic mission. Similarly, he shunned the trail-blazing Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) circle, although he had the admiration of both Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, who called Nolde "a primeval soul, a daemon of the earthly region."

Summer, spring and fall, Nolde retired to live alone in his native north, painting such familiar scenes as The Windmill (see opposite page), in which foreboding presences were splashed with ecstatic bursts of color. Winters he usually spent in Berlin, where he drew inspiration for such paintings as The Slovenes (see overleaf) from the exotic demimonde of cafe life. But the art patrons of Berlin had neither taste nor liking for Nolde's efforts. Rebuffed and brooding, Nolde dreamed of renewing the tradition of German art, joined the rising Nazi Party in 1933. In 1937, however, when the Nazis staged their exhibition of "degenerate art" in Munich, Nolde's weirdly glowing religious paintings were jeeringly displayed. Am by 1940, more than 1,000 of his work had been confiscated; the following year Nolde, at 74, was flatly forbidden to paint at all.

Defying the ban. Nolde secretly did hundreds of watercolors (he feared that snooping Nazi agents might sniff out the smell of oil paints), cached them until after the war. In his last eleven years, until his death in 1956, he translated them on canvas. On such late paintings as Three Women, Nolde orchestrated his colors in richer, more subtle hues. His lifelong aim remained the same: to put colors in harmony with the human soul. "Are not dreams like sounds and sounds like colors and colors like music?" he once asked, "I love the music of color."

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