Primeval Soul
Nevertheless, this lone wolf of German ex-
pressionism engrosses one as surely as he himself was drawn to grotesque masks and Swiss mountains assuming human semblance at the outset of his career. From the enormous sale of postcards of these pictures printed in the periodi- cal Jugend he was enabled to move to Munich, Paris, Berlin, discovering himself at the cen- tury's turn. At first a touch of Bonnard might be echoed in a springtime interior, but presently Nolde's intensified Nordic expression began to break through. Expansive blossoms became ani- mist creations. In 1909, in the remote north of Schleswig. he began to produce his religious compositions of strongly emotive colour, the weakness of the exhibition being the poor repre- sentation of this core of his achievement. The Entombment of a yellow Christ is a bizarre image indeed, wanting the technical command to convey anything like the anguished Gothic impact of a Griinewald. But it shows the primi- tive stimulus Nolde received from his travels in the South Seas at the outbreak of the first German War, with his heightened, almost bar- baric colour, queerly related to the artistic programme of the Fauves in Paris.
Grotesque elements and South Sea masks be- came merged in his paintings of the carmine-
lipped harpies of Berlin's night life. But these satiric fantasies seem to me nothing like so com- pelling as Nolde's mystical response to nature, where a lone windmill, a multi-radiant strand, a wave rearing convulsively beneath an orange tattered sky reveal a spirit in tune with Strind- berg and Munch. Thus a formidable body of work lay behind the veteran when, honoured throughout Germany and beyond, his disturbing vehemence of expression identified him with the Kulturbolschewismus of National Socialist propaganda. Nolde was forced to retire under- ground near the Danish border where he pro- duced small watercolours—his Ungemalte Bilder, projects for canvases he could not paint.
Fifteen of these exotic beauties on Japan paper form the kernel of the show. A mood of fatalism broods over many, with an ease of handling for the first time asserting itself on this miniature scale. Compassion akin to Rem- brandt's or Rouault's, and sometimes a sportive touch, are conveyed with a nervous brush line and mantling purple, chrome-yellow and mottled reds. It is an affecting, dream-like scene that closes a conflicting drama which too often eludes the grasp of one's imaginative sympathy.
NEVILE WALLIS
Previous page
