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The Life of Christ
(paintings, 1912)
There are few religious paintings—and even fewer religious painters—among the modern artists who emerged as the center of the art world at the turn of the twentieth century, but paintings on spiritual themes were a central focus of Emil Nolde’s artistic life. Between 1909 and 1951 he devoted fifty-five paintings to sacred or biblical themes. Perhaps his masterpiece is his altarpiece, The Life of Christ, a work that makes use of very traditional imagery but depicts the sacred stories in a thoroughly modern manner.
Modeling his work on the famous altarpieces created by artists such as Jan van Eyck, Emil Nolde fashioned his own personal statement of faith with a collection of nine paintings referred to jointly as The Life of Christ. This altarpiece included eight scenes of the birth, preaching, betrayal, and resurrection of Jesus arranged around a larger central image of the crucifixion. One of his unmistakable influences was clearly the famous Isenheim Altarpiece by Mattais Gruenwald, which Nolde’s central painting so stirringly echoes.
Like Gruenwald, Nolde created a harrowing depiction of the horrors of what Christ experienced in his sacrifice for the world. Using exaggerated forms and jarring colors, he captured the unsettling reality of the crucifixion rather than painting it with the calm, serene detachment seen in many religious paintings of the event. The faces of the guards and onlookers are distorted and Jesus’s body is twisted in pain; his eyes reflect agony and suffering. In keeping with medieval convention, Jesus is larger than any of the other figures in the work, signifying his sacrifice as the central message of the work. Nolde spoke of his goal as “the transformation from optical external charm to an experienced inner value.”1 He wanted the viewer to feel the import of the spiritual realities he was depicting.
Nolde’s altarpiece was first conceived when he happened to place three of his already-painted religious works next to one another in his studio and noticed how well they worked together as a unit. So in 1912 he painted the remaining six paintings and positioned them together to form the finished work. Painted during a time of great stress in his life—he was dealing with his wife’s serious illness and grappling with uncertainties about his art and his faith—The Life of Christ was a testament to his convictions and a source of strength. He always considered it his greatest artistic achievement, and described it as “drunken with religious feelings and spirituality.”2
Born Emil Hansen in northern Germany in 1867, near the Danish border, he took on the name of the small village where he was raised—Nolde—when his career began to flourish. Even as a child he loved to draw, sometimes making “paint” from the beets that were grown in the garden when there was no paint to be had. And when the young artist couldn’t find paper for his drawings, he would use chalk to cover the barn door with his artistic creations.
Nolde’s father and mother were churchgoing Protestants, and as a young boy he took delight in reading the Bible. As an adult he would bring its stories alive in vivid ways. After a series of less-than-satisfying occupations, he found a position as an art teacher, supplementing this income with his own drawings. One of his projects was a series of humorous postcards of famous Swiss mountains that were accented by anthropomorphized faces of a race of mythical giants. These proved so popular—selling one hundred thousand copies in a matter of days—that they brought him immediate notoriety for his talent as well as some financial freedom. Had he chosen to, he could likely have earned a lifelong income from such work.
But around 1900 Nolde began to forge his own individual style, which was more vigorous in its application of paint as well as vivid in its coloration. It was wilder, freer, more instinctive, and more untamed. Often these paintings were more about the violent clash of colors than about representing any object, which is why a contemporary described his paintings as “tempests of color.” Considerations of creating spacial illusion or accurate representation were not foremost in his mind; what he really cared about doing was using color to inspire an emotional response. Though he resisted the label, today Nolde is considered one of the key artists of German Expressionism, a movement of artists who were interested in the emotional realities that lurk behind the surface appearance of things. They were more concerned with capturing meanings and feelings than in literal representation, which is why this form of artistic communication was so appealing to the mystically minded Nolde.
The Life of Christ (center panel) by Emil Nolde, the Nolde Foundation, Seebüll, Germany [Private Collection Artothek/Bridgeman Images]
Nolde was never afraid to experiment. One day he left some watercolors outside to dry overnight, and in the morning he found that ice crystals had formed on them and then melted, creating unusual streaks and star-like effects. He was so pleased with this happy accident that he sometimes used a wet brush and highly absorbent Japanese paper to achieve similar effects. He enjoyed blurring the forms and colors in his work, though he never moved in the direction of total abstraction, an artistic trend of which he did not approve.
In 1913 Nolde traveled as a kind of ambassador to the German territories in the South Pacific. There he saw firsthand the innocence of the native peoples and the damage that was being done by colonialism. “We live in an evil era,” he wrote, “in which the white man brings the whole earth into servitude.”3 Yet despite his views on colonial exploitation, he remained essentially conservative and nationalistic. In fact, after the First World War he welcomed many aspects of the growing National Socialist movement in Germany, and hoped that he would be seen as an artist who could represent his nation. Nolde also thought his work would be applauded by the new government after the Nazis came into power, and that they would resonate with his fierce nationalism. But Hitler was an artistic conservative who thought modern art was repulsive and degenerate, so Nolde’s hopes were thwarted when the Nazis gave his work a prominent place in the “Degenerate Art” exhibition in Munich. Nolde’s paintings were treated by the Nazi art critics as prime examples of art that signaled the decline of Western culture into barbarism, so his paintings were removed from museums throughout Germany and placed in storage. He was even forbidden to practice as an artist.
Undaunted, Nolde continued to paint despite the prohibition, though secretly and largely for his own enjoyment. During this time he undertook an extensive series of small watercolors he could easily keep hidden away, which he dubbed his “unpainted pictures.” After the Second World War his fortunes began to improve again, and by the time of his death he was seen as the Grand Old Man of modern German art.
None of Nolde’s religious paintings represents an official commission for church display. He painted them because he cared about expressing his beliefs. “The imaginings of the boy I once was, who sat engrossed in the Bible on long winter evenings, were reawakened. When I read, I saw pictures: the richest Middle Eastern fantasies. They constantly flew around in my mind’s eye until much, much later the grown man and artist painted and painted them, as if inspired by a dream.”4
These biblical paintings were thoroughly modern in their style and in their use of color but traditional in the messages they delivered. He considered them his most important work but found them more difficult to create than his other works. The struggle came because he desperately wanted to get “inside” the stories, to paint the inner emotions they evoked.
In The Last Supper (1909), Jesus’s face and robe seem to glow, highlighting him as the focus of the work through the use of light and color. With Christ Among the Children (1910), as in so many of his paintings, he made no attempt to hide the marks of the painter at work. The apostles are rendered in weighty, heavy brushstrokes, while the children are painted with lighter strokes and a lighter touch. It is sweet in tone but not maudlin as many pictures of this subject have often been. Dance Around the Golden Calf (1910) pictures the scene from Exodus where the children of Israel, in the absence of Moses, have given themselves to idolatry and immorality. Here we see evidence of the ecstatic joy that Nolde took in bright colors, as a barely repressed sensuality and passion burst forth in the tense frenetic wildness of the figures.
There is a gentler touch to two of his later biblical paintings. Christ and the Adulteress (1926) portrays the tenderness of Jesus as he looks with love and forgiveness upon the woman whom he has just rescued from stoning. He cradles the reclining woman in his arms as her judges look on in disapproval, the work a painted meditation on God’s grace toward imperfect humanity. The Great Gardener (1940) finds God the Father looking down upon his creation as a kindly caretaker, breathing life into the tender foliage that his hand reaches out to touch. The greens and blues are jewel-like, almost as transparent as a stained glass window.
Emil Nolde identified especially with the sufferings of Christ, a mystical connection that he drew upon during the difficult patches in his own life. A visionary and a loner, Nolde had a singular vision that he expressed through wild orgies of violent color as he represented the stories that had nurtured his faith. He did not set out to become a religious painter, but as he painted what interested him, biblical themes came to the fore. “I followed an irresistible desire to represent profound spirituality, religion, and tenderness, without much intention, knowledge, or deliberation.”5 The resulting art shows the power of his intuitions.