Emil Nolde

Emil Nolde is not an easy artist to like. His art is uneven in quality, frequently naive, and often racist, regressive, and crude. His vision of humanity is—to put it mildly—grotesque. Nevertheless, he is an impressive, occasionally even astounding artist, as this retrospective makes clear. First, Nolde is a superb colorist: Very few painters can employ such high-key combinations without causing their work to seem acidic and contrived. But Nolde’s palette convinces because it creates light and does not merely read as exercise or arrangement. There are obvious studies of realistic (or at least conventional) tonality, like the late-Romantic Mondnacht (Moonlit Night), 1903, and even allegories of illumination like Lichtzauber (Magic of Light), 1907, but most impressive are the technically fantastic, less literal examples like Wildtanzende Kinder (Wildly Dancing Children), 1909, and Maler Schmidt-Rottluff (The Painter Schmidt-Rottluff), 1906, in which the paintings themselves seem to emanate light, as if they were little handmade suns. The seascapes are particularly spectacular. Inherited from van Gogh, Nolde’s facture often enhances the organic, orgiastic intensity of his works, especially those made in the decade leading up to World War I. In the end, though, what is most moving in this exhibition is neither an individual painting nor a group of paintings—however bejeweled—but rather the total effect of the artist’s life, given, for better and (tragically) worse, to art, and to painting above all. Nolde asked everything of art—perhaps, by today’s standards, too much. There are many perspectives from which to critique such desperation, and history tells its costs. But it is hard not to be affected, at least on a romantic level, by its example.