The question of separating art from the artist remains controversial. The case of the great German Expressionist painter Emil Nolde seems even more complicated. In the 2010s, archival evidence uncovered that Nolde was a staunch Nazi who attempted to climb the political ladder of the Third Reich. For years, Nolde pretended to be the victim of the regime, unfairly persecuted like many artists. As the evidence reached the public, museums had to change the tone of Nolde’s exhibitions, while German Chancellor Angela Merkel removed his paintings from her office.
Emil Nolde and His Long Path to Artistic Fame
For decades, Emil Nolde was the established master of German Expressionism, known for his bold colors and expressive lines. Often described as one of the victims of the Nazi regime, he claimed to have suffered from its oppressive cultural politics. Nolde was the youngest son of a poor farmer born in 1867 in Prussia. Eager to escape this life, he started his career as a woodcarver and illustrator, yet struggled to receive recognition until his forties. Part of the reason might have been Nolde’s personality, as he was never an easy person to deal with. Ill-tempered and loud, he could not handle criticism and accepted only his own point of view on both art and politics. He compensated for deep self-doubt with an inflated ego, always seeking someone to blame for his earlier artistic failures. Among his favorite targets were Jewish artists and art collectors.
Emil Nolde started to gain prominence in 1906 when he joined the short-lived yet influential group of Expressionists called Die Brücke (The Bridge). The Primitivist art of Die Brücke drew inspiration from woodblock prints and African art while working with the distinctively modern subject matter of urban scenes. However, the group lasted a little longer than a year, with artists moving each in their own direction. Nolde’s Die Brücke colleagues included Max Pechstein and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.
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Sign up to our Free Weekly NewsletterNolde aimed to study at the prestigious Munich Academy of Arts under the guidance of conservative Symbolist Franz von Stuck but was rejected. Instead, he received his training from Adolf Holzel, an abstract pioneer who trained many of the leading Expressionists and future Bauhaus leaders. In 1908, Nolde joined the Berlin Secession, the anti-academist movement of German Modernist artists. However, he was expelled after a couple of years due to a dramatic conflict with Max Liebermann, the Secession’s president. The reason for that was Nolde’s strong opinion on the art scene allegedly dominated and controlled by Jews like Liebermann.
Curiously, during the Secession assembly, Lieberman voted against Nolde’s exclusion to avoid confrontation, but 40 other members decided otherwise, probably tired of the artist’s ill temper and radical views. In the early 1920s, Nolde became a member of the newly emerged National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Around that time, he started to write a memoir that would later become the main source of his life narrative, both real and fabricated.
The Nazis’ War on Expressionism
Although today German Expressionism is most closely associated with oppression and persecution from the Nazi regime, this was not always the case. In the early days of the Third Reich, public figures like the propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels actively endorsed Expressionist painting and print. They referred to it as the expression of the German spirit and interpreted it as the revival of early German Gothic art.
In 1933, Nolde and his wife celebrated the National Socialists’ rise to power. In pro-Nazi newspapers, Nolde’s work was described as Nordic and truly German. The press remembered his old conflict with Liebermann and praised Nolde as the devoted patriot fighting the Jewish dictatorship. Instead of his usual Bible scenes, he moved towards illustrating German myths and legends, hoping to become the official state artist of the Reich and the head of the Berlin art school.
His methods to climb the career ladder were far from ethical. To attract the attention of the authorities, he devised a deportation plan for German Jews and sent it to the officials. To eliminate competition, he denounced his Die Brücke colleague Max Pechstein as a Jew to the propaganda ministry. Pechstein, neither a Jew nor a Nazi, spent several excruciating months proving his German origins to save his life.
However, Nolde’s efforts gave no substantial result. Adolf Hitler saw his paintings and was unimpressed by them. The Fuhrer’s radical conservatism became the only acceptable aesthetic doctrine of the new state. Soon after Nolde’s 70th birthday in 1937, the same propaganda ministry that endorsed him confiscated more than a thousand of his works from German museums. His works then appeared at the notorious propagandist exhibition showing Degenerate Art, which aimed to condemn Modernism as the product of mental decay and destructive Jewish influence. Nolde believed this was a simple mistake, and wrote dozens of letters to the officials and press, proclaiming his Nazi views, anti-Semitic stance, and loyalty towards German art. Still, the Ministry of Culture banned him from exhibiting his works.
Despite the restrictions, Emil Nolde and his wife met World War II enthusiastically. They spent most of it in their estate on the Danish border, with Nolde painting and working on his autobiography. In these years, his anti-Semitic and violent views reached their aggressive peaks. However, as the war’s end drew close, Nolde had to find a way to detach himself from the losing side.
The Post-War Years: Lies and Rehabilitation
After the end of World War II brought up the global condemnation of Nazism, Nolde struggled to reinvent himself to stay relevant and welcome. He started to rewrite his memoir hastily, painting the picture of himself as the victim of the regime. The frequent visits from Nolde’s friends who worked for the Gestapo turned into non-stop government surveillance on paper. He also removed the most repulsive anti-Semitic passages from the text.
In his memoir, he recalled being banned from painting by the Nazis and secretly creating watercolors that he later had to hide under his floorboards. None of this was true. Although Nolde was indeed one of the strawman artists used to condemn degenerative art, his career did not suffer as much as he wanted people to believe. He became more cautious but still continued to paint. The only limitation was related to the sales of his paintings, which had to be approved and authorized in advance. The allegedly secret watercolors that he called the “unpainted paintings” were in reality painted in the early thirties, years before Nolde faced any oppression of his artistic pursuits.
Still, this time Nolde’s efforts paid off. In 1952, he received an order of merit for his outstanding influence on art and was invited to participate in the Venice Biennale. He died in 1956, once again popular, loved, and reinstalled as a great artist and the icon of Expressionist art.
The Emil Nolde Foundation: Reshaping the Narrative
But why did it take so long for the truth to come out? Nolde passed away in 1956, just a decade after the war, giving historians plenty of time to uncover the evidence instead of playing into his self-invented myth. The reason that the false narrative survived for such a long time was the effort of the Emil Nolde Foundation that downplayed or even directly suppressed the information regarding Nolde’s involvement with the Nazis. Such politics lasted until 2013 when the newly appointed Foundation head Christian Ring decided to open up their archives to the public.
In the years following his appointment, Ring organized several exhibitions of Nolde’s oeuvre that focused on the updated narrative of his life and the reflection of his beliefs in his art. According to Ring, the public felt uncomfortable, often expressing aggression and despair. Many of them grew up studying and admiring Noldle’s work and had difficulties fitting the concepts of Nolde the painter and Nolde the Nazi into one full picture.
Among those confused and startled was the German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Days after the opening of a 2019 show exposing the artist, she removed two of his paintings from her office. The paintings were pre-war landscapes loaned from the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation to illustrate the better part of German culture clear from the poisoning influence of Nazism. According to rumors, Merkel was a great admirer of German Expressionism and replaced Nolde’s works with his consistently apolitical colleague Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Yet, many Germans found this decision controversial, believing that the obvious artistic talent of Emil Nolde could not be diminished by his political stance.
The case of Emil Nolde shows much more than a set of intolerable political beliefs of a single artist. Apart from Nolde, dozens of people became involved in a massive-scale web of lies over the course of six decades, covering the artist’s tracks and agreeing with his thinly veiled excuses. After all, a terrible person can still produce great works of art, as many legendary figures from art history keep teaching us. However, the only thing that can minimize his deeds and beliefs is the weightened, thoughtful, and honest public reaction.
