ArtistGermanb.1867–d.1956
Emil Nolde
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Emil Nolde was born Hans Emil Hansen on August 7, 1867, in the village of Nolde near the German-Danish border - a flat, wind-exposed landscape of marshes and sea that would shape his visual imagination for the rest of his life. He trained first as a wood-carver and furniture designer, and it was not until his early thirties, when postcard reproductions of his mountain drawings sold well enough to fund formal study, that he committed fully to painting. He took the name of his birthplace in 1902, the same year he married Danish actress Ada Vilstrup.
In 1906, the Dresden-based group Die Brücke invited Nolde to join them, drawn to what they described as his "storm of colour." He participated for about eighteen months before withdrawing - a pattern that suited his deeply solitary temperament. His influence on the group was real: he shared printmaking techniques that several members absorbed into their own practice, and the Schiefler catalogue raisonné eventually recorded 231 etchings, 197 woodcuts, and 83 lithographs among his graphic output. He pushed etching materials to unusual ends, building texture through acid application and scratching, and used lithography to explore color in serial variations.
Nolde painted with an intensity that made his religious works genuinely unsettling. The Last Supper (1909) and Dance Around the Golden Calf (1910) used raw color and compressed figures to convey spiritual urgency rather than historical narrative. In Berlin he studied ethnographic collections closely, producing work that drew on imagery from outside the Western tradition. His flower paintings and seascapes - with their churning clouds and northern light - brought the same emotional directness to quieter subject matter.
The most unusual chapter of his career came under the Nazi regime. Nolde had been a member of the Nazi Party's Danish section and expressed views aligned with its ideology, yet the regime classified his work as degenerate art and confiscated 1,052 of his works from German museums - more than any other artist. Banned from painting in 1941, he secretly produced over 1,300 small watercolors in his house at Seebüll, working in miniature with images he called the "Ungemalte Bilder" (Unpainted Pictures). These works, never offered for sale during his lifetime, are now central to his legacy and remain at the Nolde Foundation Seebüll, which opened as a museum in 1957, the year after his death.
Nolde received the Print Prize at the 26th Venice Biennale and the Order Pour le mérite. His work is held at MoMA, the Guggenheim, Tate, the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, and numerous other institutions. On Auctionist, his 21 items span prints, drawings, and paintings appearing at German auction houses including Karl and Faber, Grisebach, and Van Ham, as well as Scandinavian houses. The top recorded sale is a work titled "Ships" at 72,500 CHF, reflecting the sustained demand his prints and works on paper command on the international market.