we live forward, but we understand backwards
5th century BC
6th century AD
16th century
16th – 17th century
18th century
19th century
20th century and beyond
Happy New Year!!!
P.S. This came as a result of rediscovering X’s letter with the extensive quotation from Eliot’s poem “Four Quartets”. The hand written page is hers.
In 1995 I visited Husum, a small town near the German – Danish borders, on my way to Neukirchen, where Emil Nolde’s studio and house is, today a museum of the Nolde foundation.
I posted an article on my visit and showed some of the photos I have taken.
A visitor to the blog, liked the photos so much that he decided to use them in a video clip he was preparing, featuring music of the Greek Group Super Nova. Here is the result of his efforts.
The music reflects perfectly the mood of the place, the darkness and calmness of the North seascape.
I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did.
Today is Palm Sunday, the day that the crowds greeted Jesus with Palm leaves in Jerusalem (and they crucified him a few days later). For me it is a day full of flowers, even more so than the 1st of May, as Easter has this special atmosphere and feeling about it. It is therefore no surprise that as I continue with my post about Emil Nolde, the great German painter of the first half of the 20th century, the theme of this post is flowers. Nolde loved flowers, as you will see in the pictures that follow. I have arranged the pictures in chronological order, so that changes in style and technique can be identified in an easier way, if this is of interest to you. The commentary I have used is from the source of the picture, if available.
Museo Thyssen Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain
All his life Nolde was moved by the beauty of plants and flowers. In his later years in the grounds of his houses at Utenwarf and in Seebüll, Nolde created elaborate gardens filled with a wide range of exotic flowers from all around the globe.
Painted in 1907, Violette Blumen is one of the first series of flower paintings that Nolde painted during his summer visits to the Baltic island of Alsen in 1906, 1907 and 1908. Moving on from his purely impressionistic beginnings, the stark intensity of colour in a painting such as Violette Blumen reveals Nolde consciously using colour to stimulate and evoke an emotional response in the viewer.
Much of the inspiration for this ‘humanizing’ of nature came not just from Nolde’s own personal experience but also from the example set for him by Vincent Van Gogh. Like Van Gogh, Nolde always aimed to work swiftly and impulsively over the surface of the picture in order to give energy and life to his paintings and heighten their sense of emotional intensity. Nolde, like many of his contemporaries, was greatly suspicious of the rational element in art and elevated instinct above reason as being the most important source of creativity. ‘In art I fight for unconscious creation’, he wrote to his friend Hans Fehr, reiterating elsewhere that ‘the quicker a painting is done, the better it is…When inspiration falters, even for a moment, barren reason leaps to the rescue, and then the work is ruined. If only I could catch it, I would pin reason against the wall and give it a good hiding.’ (Emil Nodle cited in Max Sauerlandt ed., Emil Nolde Briefe aus den Jahren 1894-1926 Hamburg, 1967, p. 31)
On the island of Alsen it was the well-kept fisherman’s cottages there, which had ‘small, rich, beautifully kept gardens, surrounded by beech hedges and always abounding in flowers,’ that inspired many of his finest and most adventurous paintings. For Nolde, flowers were a vivid example of the eternal cycle of birth, life and death in Nature. As a passage in his autobiography reveals, flowers were for him a beautiful product of creation and could be likened to a work of art in the sense that their life cycle was essentially the same. Both, he argued, were the products of natural forces and thereby subject to the same laws of creation and inevitable decay, ‘shooting up, blooming, radiating, glowing, gladdening, drooping, wilting, and ultimately thrown away and dying. Our human destinies are by no means always so logical or so beautiful’ (Emil Nolde. Jahre de Kämpfe 1902-1914, Berlin, 1934, p.228.).
Nolde’s flower paintings communicate the artist’s pantheist belief in nature and his love of all aspects of creation. In this respect they relate closely to his darker and more complex religious paintings, which Nolde insisted, demanded ‘a particular attitude of mind’ from the viewer.
Depicting the radiant blooming colour of a variety of different flowers sprouting from the green undergrowth and seeming to scream the richness and vitality of their from the surface of the picture, Violette Blumen is an intense and heavily textured work that boldly asserts Nolde’s love of and atavistic faith in the beneficial power of the garden.
In its stark contrast of rich reds and deep purples set against their chromatic opposites of pale greens and light yellows, this painting radiates with a full colour intensity. It is an intensity for which Nolde, in these early years received some criticism from people complaining that such paintings falsely exaggerated the colours of nature. Such criticism Nolde strongly rebuked as he discussed with Hans Fehr at this time. ‘The beholder’, he told his friend, ‘will say about my flower paintings that the colours are exaggerated. That is not true. I once positioned my canvases amidst the flowers themselves and saw immediately how much they paled compared to nature. We have no idea how jaded our eyes have become’ (Emil Nolde in conversation with Hans Fehr in 1908, cited in Hans Fehr, op cit, p. 56).
Source: Christie’s, Department of Impressionist and Modern Art
Painted in 1908 and acquired by Hans Fehr in 1910, Blaue Stiefmütterchen (Violas) is one of several early flower paintings made by Nolde in which, working within the legacy of Vincent Van Gogh, the artist deliberately sought to echo and mimic the procreative colour and bloom of nature through the texture, brushstroke and creativity of his own painting.
For Nolde, his lifelong love of flowers was deeply rooted with his profound sense of ‘Heimat’ that began in his mother’s garden in the village of Nolde when Emil was a child. There, Nolde later recalled, ‘I often walked with her in the garden… and so I could not help but watch all the flowers as they grew, blossomed and shone forth. There was a bed of noble red roses where I would sometimes cut back the wild, thorny shoots for her. All the flowers bloomed for her pleasure and for mine, and the sun shone out over the garden.’ (Emil Nolde Das eigene Leben (1867-1902), Cologne, 1994, p. 120).
In this witnessing of the natural life-cycle of flowers rooted to and later blooming and dying in their own native soil Nolde recognised a clear metaphor for the way he felt about his own art and life. ‘In painting I always hoped that through me, as the painter, the colours would take effect on the canvas as logically as nature creates her configurations, as ore and crystals form, as moss and algae grow, as flowers must unfold and bloom under the rays of the sun’ (Emil Nolde, Jahre der Kämpfe 1902-1914, Berlin, 1934, p. 107).
Source: Christie’s, Department of Impressionist and Modern Art
Basel Kunstmuseum, Switzerland
Like the sea, flowers were an abiding source of inspiration and consolation for Emil Nolde, a cause for joy in periods of difficulty. Nolde’s wife Ada shared his love of flowers and together they planted gardens with tulips, dahlias, poppies, irises, bluebells, and sunflowers at their homes in Alsen, Unterward, and Seebüll. Of their small garden in Alsen, Nolde wrote, “I loved the glowing colors of the flowers, the purity of their colors.” After he and Ada moved to Unterward in 1916, Nolde used the absorbent Japan paper that he had discovered in Berlin about 1910 and worked “wet in wet.” Nolde had ambitions to be a figure painter, specifically to paint religious subjects. But he took with him from flower painting that use of broad planes of color for emotional impact.
Source: St Louis Art Museum , USA
North Carolina Museum of Art
Galerie Nehen, Essen, Germany
Detroit, Institute of Arts, USA
Museo Thyssen Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain
Sunflowers in the Windstorm was painted while World War II raged across much of the globe. At the time he created this work, German artist Emil Nolde was forbidden by the Nazi government to paint. The Nazis, who preferred idealized art that promoted party policies, detested Nolde’s emotionally expressive style of painting, which they labeled “degenerate.” In defiance of the order, Nolde painted in secret anyway. Most often he painted watercolors; only on rare occasions did he dare to paint in oils, for fear that the smell of the pigments might betray him. Sunflowers in the Windstorm is one of just five oil paintings he created in 1943. Its storm battered flowers, which bend but do not break, may be read as symbols of the human spirit in the toughest of times.
Source: Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, USA
Galerie Ludorff, Duesseldorf, Germany
I continue today with the second part of the Crucifixion paintings, from the 19th to the 20th century.
Paul Gauguin
Yellow Christ (1889)
Albright-Know Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, USA
Emil Nolde
Crucifixion (1912)
Nolde Stifftung, Seebull
On February 20, 1912, the painter Emil Nolde wrote to his friend and patron Karl Osthaus, director of the Folkwang Museum in Hagen, concerning an upcoming exhibition there, and announced a major new work:
In the last year I have created a piece consisting of nine biblical pictures that belong together.I finished it during the last few weeks. I thought that I would also send this to you forexhibition. The size of the entire piece: 240cm high, 630cm wide.
On February 28, 1912, he wrote to his long-time friend Hans Fehr about the piece, enclosing a thumbnail sketch of it that shows a large central picture of a crucifixion flanked on either side byfour paintings. Nolde identified the subjects of the eight smaller canvases in writing on thesketch: Holy Night and The Twelve-Year-Old Christ (left above), The Three Magi and TheBetrayal of Christ (left below), Women at the Tomb and Ascension (right above), Resurrectionand Doubting Thomas (right below).2 All nine canvases of this work, known collectively as TheLife of Christ, remain together today in the galleries of the Nolde Foundation, near Seebüll,Germany.
Nolde no doubt recognized that the monumental scheme of The Life of Christ–far larger than any previous work–almost literally hinged on Crucifixion.7 For it he incorporated a symmetrical severity and a solidity of construction well beyond any earlier picture. The three crosses establish the central axis, outer boundaries, and upper edge of the composition. Nolde pushed the figures almost into a single plane very close to the picture’s surface. He reinforced the iconic effect that results with certain aspects of his primitivizing style, mainly angular forms, flat colors, and unworked surfaces….
Of the individual canvases for The Life of Christ, Crucifixion contains the most obvious traces of an interest in Northern Medieval art. Crucifixions from this period frequently include several motifs—all incorporated by Nolde. First, the tortured flesh of Christ, in the form of an emaciated body, prominent wounds, and streams of blood. Grünewald’s Crucifixion from the Isenheim Altarpiece is the best known and most extreme example of this type. Second, the followers traditionally stand to the left of the cross and display intense emotions through gesture and physiognomy, often with the Magdalene on her knees and grasping the base of the cross and the Virgin collapsing into the arms of St. John. Third, many contrast the followers on the left with an equally distinct group of executioners and mockers to the right. Nolde even imitated a convention of some Medieval art by enlarging the body of Christ for prominence.
Source: William B. Sieger, Literary Texts and Formal Strategies in Emil Nolde’s Religious Paintings
Georges Roualt
Crucifixion (early 1920s)
Minneapolis Institute of Arts
Pablo Picasso
Crucifixion (1930)
Musee Picasso, Paris, France
Picasso in addition to the painting (oil on wood) prepared more than ten drawings with ink as “studies” on crucifixion. The Isenheim Altarpiece of Grunewald gave him inspiration and challenge.
Marc Chagall
White Crucifixion (1938)
Art Institute of Chicago
Francis Bacon
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion circa 1944
Tate Gallery, London, UK
When this triptych was first exhibited at the end of the war in 1945, it secured Bacon’s reputation. The title relates these horrific beasts to the saints traditionally portrayed at the foot of the cross in religious painting. Bacon even suggested he had intended to paint a larger crucifixion beneath which these would appear.He later related these figures to the Eumenides – the vengeful furies of Greek myth, associating them within a broader mythological tradition. Typically, Bacon drew on a range of sources for these figures, including a photograph purporting to show the materialisation of ectoplasm and the work of Pablo Picasso.
Source: Tate Gallery’s website
Fragment of a Crucifixion (1950)
Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven
Major artists create myths around themselves or have the ability to motivate others to do it for them. The way Francis Bacon’s work has been received is coloured by this. The view that at certain moments the person and the work sometime coincide gained increasing emphasis in Bacon’s career, culminating with the feature fi lm Love is the Devil (1998) by John Maybury. There is hardly any other artist whose world is so much a part of his work, and spicy details about his life are happily quoted by biographers and reviewers. Bacon himself refused to go into the interpretation of his paintings and after 1962 even forbid any interpretive comment in catalogues. His argument was that there was not anything to explain. Fragment of a Crucifi xion and the response to Bacon’s work give cause to think about interpretation, biography and autonomy. Do the paintings exemplify a state of mind, or can they be related to views about identity and the male body? Do they represent a post-war view on the world, in which the automation of human interaction can be heard, or do the themes deprive us of an insight into a painter ‘easy on himself’?
Source: Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven
Salvador Dali
Christ of Saint John of the Cross: Nuclear Mysticism (1951)
Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow
“The title of the painting was said to have been inspired by a drawing made by a Spanish Carmelite friar who was canonised as St John of The Cross in the 16th Century.
It was made after the saint had a vision in which he saw the crucifixion from above.
Dali painted his crucifixion scene set above the rocky harbour of his home village of Port Lligat in Spain. “
Source: BBC
Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) (1954)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA
Dali commented on his painting:
“Metaphysical, transcendent cubism, it is based entirely on the Treatise on Cubic Form by Juan de Herrera, Philip the 2nd’s architect, builder of the Escorial Palace: it is a treatise inspired by Ars Magna of the Catalonian philosopher and alchemist Raymond Lulle. The cross is formed by an octahedral hypercube. The number nine is identifiable and becomes especially consubstantial with the body of Christ. The extremely noble figure of Gala is the perfect union of the develpment of the hypercubic octahedron on the human level of the cube. She is depicted in front of the Bay of Port Lligat. The most noble beings were painted by Velazques and Zurbaran; I only approach nobility while painting Gala, and noblity can only be insired by the human being.”
Antonio Saura
Crucifixion (1959)
Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Euskaleria
“Ever since I was a boy I have been obsessed with Velázquez’ Christ in the Prado in Madrid, with his face darkened by the black hair of a Flamenco dancer, with his bullfighter’s feet, with the stillness of a flesh and bone puppet transformed into Adonis. I can even see myself immersed in the hazy museum, holding my father’s hand and looking at the terrible pacific cross, which I remember as something immense”.
The constant presence of the Crucifixion between 1956 and 1996 doesn’t respond to religious belief. It is, in the artist’s own words, a way of looking at the “timeless presence of suffering”.
“Contrary to Velázquez’ Christ, in these works I thought that by giving the image a feeling of tension and protest it was possible to capture a trace of almost blasphemous humour, but there is something else. In the image of the Crucified Christ, I may have reflected my situation of man alone in a threatening universe at which it is possible to shout, although, seen from another angle, I am also interested in the tragedy of a man “not that of a god” absurdly nailed to a cross. An image which can still serve as the tragic symbol of our era”.
Source: Guggenheim Museum’s website