In a way, this post is an extension to the section on Emil Nolde of my first research point. Following a mention at the Stiftung Seebüll Website, I decided to visit the Nolde Exposition “In search of the authentic” in the National Gallery in Oslo, Norway. The Exposition runs from 12 October to 20 January 2013, and it was said to present around 100 major works by Nolde, including paintings, watercolours, and prints.

I had so much liked the Nolde Exposition in Berlin and was excited to see more original works. It was great. The exposition in Oslo presented a broad variety in a biographical context, and I had several light bulb moments of insights about the artists work.

Entering the exhibition was a bit complicated at first. The good thing was that taking photos was allowed, but taking my rucksack with sketchbook and drawing equipment inside was not allowed and visitors who intended to draw needed a special permission. I don’t speak Norwegian but luckily we could sort it all out in English. In the end I had put the rucksack into a museum locker, obtained the special permission and a badge which made me feel like a journalist on an important mission, and got a plastic bag from the museum shop to take my equipment, including camera and notebook, with me.

Expedition to New Guinea

The first part of the exhibition was devoted to the expedition to New Guinea which Nolde undertook 1913/14. A huge world map showed the itinerary, which was quite impressive. I imagined the time it must have taken to travel that far. Nolde had depicted what he saw, and some of these were presented, like the series of rural scenes watercolours.

I like them for their simplicity and was surprised by their difference in style from other works by Nolde I had seen. They look like being made with the intention of documenting what he saw, rather than working on elaborate composition or colouring. Nevertheless they are nicely composed.

Seascapes

Then there was a room devoted to landscape paintings, one of Nolde’s favourite subjects. The very famous ‘Tall Breaker’ (1948) was presented. This painting is breathtaking… I know the northern sea and its wildness when there’s stormy weather, and this is what I recognize in the painting. And it’s lovely how Nolde captured the deep turqoise of the water breaking up, which is in a beautiful colourplay with the white foam and dark blue wave surfaces. What I also like about this painting is that it captures a brief moment in a way which remains lively and with inner movement.

The other seascape painting presented (of which I unfortunately haven’t noted title and year) has this same quality. For me this is great art. It is in contrast to some other realistic paintings of the sea which I didn’t like because the wavy water was depicted massive, explicit and dead. The photos I took don’t really capture the beauty of the paintings, they rather serve as a reminder.

  

 

Unpainted Pictures (watercolours)

Then there was a series of small watercolours which are part of what Nolde called his ‘unpainted pictures’ because they were made during the time when he was prohibited to work in Nazi Germany before World War II. During that time, Nolde was reported to have used all kinds of used paper as support for his secret paintings. I was fascinated by the colourfulness of these watercolours and took a closer look to find out about the technique.

That morning I had re-read the Wikipedia article on watercolours, which contains a section about techniques. Besides those techniques I had become acquainted with from sthe study materials, the article explains a technique of pouring paint onto wet paper, to broadly outline the colour shapes of the subject, then overworking the painting to bring out more details. When I had read this, it was too abstract and I couldn’t imagine what the result of such a technique would be. But looking at Nolde’s watercolours, I recognized the method and think this was what he did in this series.

I choose one of the watercolours for detailed study, the one with two women before a yellow sky (the middle painting). One of the women is looking towards the viewer. She is painted in orange and red tones. The other is turning her face away. She has dark brown hair and a purple dress. Looking at the original work I was imagining how Nolde first laid down the broad areas of colour – the yellow sky to the left, red and orange to the top right, and blue and violet to the bottom right. The upper woman has shades of blue around her eyes. On top of this are dark black lines for the contours of face, hair and dress of the two women, as well as some clouds and a mountaneous structure at the bottom of the painting.

To study the composition, I made a sketchbook drawing after this watercolour, using watersoluble wax crayon but without water.

 

 

 

 

 

My photographs of Nolde’s watercolours suffer from reflections in the glass screens of the frames. Again, they just serve as a reminder. I searched the web but did not find a quality reproduction of this particular watercolour. But I found a good reproduction of one of the other exhibits in this series, titled ‘Zwei Menschen’ (Two people), in which Nolde seemed to have used a similar technique of laying out the broad colour areas first, then using line to bring out forms.

 

 

More unpainted pictures: Landscapes

Another watercolour which impressed me was the landscape with burning red clouds over a field. As I had already seen recently in the Berlin exposition, I think Nolde mostly used a wet-in-wet, or at least wet-in-damp technique, to obtain beautiful colour blendings that perfectly fit with the irregular characteristics in the landscapes.

Then my interest was captured by a watercolour titled ‘Autumn sea’ (1920). It is also in a dark, burning read, with yellow structures emerging from amidst, and it really looks like a huge fire. Looking closer, I imagined Nolde had used a variation in technique here which I remember from childhood experiments with watercolour: painting on one half of the sheet, then folding the sheet to obtain a mirror immage on the other half. And this watercolour looks a bit as if the horizon line had been the folding edge, with the colour mass of the burning sky creating mirror reflections on the area representing the sea.

It is a really beautiful effect, and a perfect fit with the irregular reflections of a colourful sundown on a water surface. It may not be an accurate representation of what has objectively been there, but it conveys the impressiveness of such scenery in nature.

  

 Flowers (watercolour and oil paintings)

Then there was the room with Nolde’s flower paintings and watercolours, which I found simply breath-taking. It was also nice to see both types of works next to each other. Sometimes I see more density and massiveness in Nolde’s watercolours than what I found typical for watercolour until now, and more lightheartendess and movements in the oil paintings than in paintings from other painters. I see this also in the seascapes exposed here. But it’s certainly difficult to draw this kind of comparison with my very limited knowledge of art history.

  

  

Concluding reflections

I thoroughly enjoyed visiting this exposition and can’t value enough to have followed the suggestion in the course materials to see original works, and not only book or internet reproductions. In an exhibition, details like the paper structure, how colours are blending, or the character of lines can be evaluated from very close and compared to their effect when looked at from a distance, which is very instructive. And then there’s an emotional effect looking at original works, which I hadn’t experienced from looking at reproductions only. Maybe it’s because original works are a real thing which has been created by a person alive. This has a different effect than looking at electronic pixels on a computer screen.

I found the fact that the watercolours were presented behind glass disturbing for taking photographs. So what I present here are my reminders about the pictures I saw. I wish artists’ works were more completely catalogued on the internet, then I could have used better reproductions in the article. Maybe some day in the future all human art will be available in an electronic version too? But hopefully people will not take the electronic representation as replacement for the real thing, because it isn’t!

With respect to the techniques used by Nolde, I’d certainly like to experiment with the wet-in-wet technique in my own practice, and also found the colour-pouring and the folded-image technique interesting.

To complete my dose of Nolde for this year, there’s just opened another exhibition in the Berlin house of the Seebüll Foundation, about the artist’s relationship to Switzerland and the mountains. I’m planning to go there next week or so.

Actually there were more aspects of the Nolde exhibition in Oslo which touched me, and also in what I saw afterwards when I visited the permanent exhibition of the National Gallery. But I judged these to be more closely related to my current learning in the drawing course, so I will refer to them in the other blog. The separation is a bit artificial, but necessary because students are supposed to not submit the same material twice. So I decided to split up the report about my Oslo study day. This part was directly related to my learning about watercolour, and the other part is more closely connected my drawing attempts. But in reality, there’s mutual benefit, and I hope there’s no separation in the actual learning process I’m going through.

 

References

Emil Nolde Stiftung Seebüll
http://www.nolde-stiftung.de/en/24/startseite-portal.html

Emil Nolde exposition, National Gallery, Oslo, Norway
http://www.nasjonalmuseet.no/en/?module=EventCalendar;action=Event.publicOpen;ID=778&template=exhibitionView_en

Wikipedia: Watercolour painting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watercolor_painting

Emil Nolde, Zwei Menschen (ungemaltes Bild)
http://www.listen.no/sted_event.php?sted_id=&nummer=10449

Inspired by an article on the We Are OCA website which presented a beautiful still life by Paul Cézanne, I took some more time to read about the artist. I new his name since a long time and had a superficial liking for the paintings I had seen, but never looked in any more detail or depth until now.

Paul Cézanne 1902 Apple, Bottle and Chair Back

The article is about the exhibition ‘Mantegna to Matisse’ at Courtauld Gallery, and author Jim points to its relevance for both students of drawing and watercolour. Indeed I was unsure to which of these two courses, which I’m now studying in parallel, I would associate my own Blog article. I chose the Watercolour Blog because I was attracted by a painting rather than a drawing. But probably this choice is arbitrary because I don’t know yet in what ways knowing more about Cézanne might influence my own development. I might review this aspect at a later time!

As usual, I began with a Google search about Paul Cézanne and found the German Wikipedia article about him very interesting and insightful. While I typically start with the English Wikipedia, this time I preferred to read the German article because it appeared to cover the artist’s life and work in greater depth. It is even marked with a Wikipedia star for article quality and might thus be still more informative than the French article.

Paul Cézanne (1839 – 1906), French painter, was born in Aix-en-Provence and lived in the south of France for most of his life, but he also lived in Paris for some time. He had been married to his long-standing painting model Marie-Hortense Fiquet and they had a son, but their marriage wasn’t happy – presumably because of Paul Cézannes difficult personality, illustrated by quotes from his closer friends several times in the Wikipedia article. But his influence on contemporary painters must have been enormous. The article mentions Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque and André Derain and reports relationship with many other artists. Cézanne’s work is now seen as the foundation of ‘Classical Modernism’. As the English Wikipedia article puts it:

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th century Impressionism and the early 20th century’s new line of artistic enquiry, Cubism. The line attributed to both Matisse and Picasso that Cézanne “is the father of us all” cannot be easily dismissed.

From the many paintings presented in the article I especially liked ‘The Card Players’ because of its beautiful colouring. The tones are beautifully shaded and very lively. For example, the brown table contains all brown tones from dark umber to yellow ochre, or the green jacket of one of the player has a multitude of different shades of green.

Paul Cézanne 1892-95 The Card Players

I also very much like one of his earlier works, ‘Snow Melting’, painted around 1870 in very dark colours (except for the snow), which seemed to have been typical for the painter’s early years. It was only from around the mid-1870s that he changed his colour choice to more brighter tones, reportedly influenced by his friend, painter Camille Pissaro.

Paul Cézanne ca. 1870 Snow melting

A search for Cézanne’s watercolour paintings brought up beautiful watercolour still life of fruit on a dish, mentioned in a Guardian article from January 2002. The original painting had long been confounded with a fake painting of excellent quality. The article reports that the original is now owned by the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archeology, but unfortunately I could not locate it on their website, so found no further information about its title or date of painting for now. It was not included in their online collection of paintings, but I found information about a ‘Print Room’ at the museum presenting not only prints but also drawings, and it might be included there. I was just a little bit surprised that watercolour paintings are called ‘drawings’ which reminded me of the difficulty to distinguish between painting and drawing.

Paul Cézanne (undated) Still Life with Peaches and Figs

And indeed, the painting is included in the drawings collection… It is not dated. It was made with graphite and watercolour on white paper, its size is around 20 x 30 cm. It very much looks like a study for the very Cézanne-like still life oil paintings of fruit decorated on a table, but with watercolour it is much lighter, less massive in character than what I see in Cézannes oil paintings.

 

References

OCA article: Mantegna to Matisse, by Jim on 30 August 2012
http://www.weareoca.com/fine_art/mantegna-to-matisse/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=mantegna-to-matisse

Paul Cezanne, German Wikipedia article
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_C%C3%A9zanne

English Wikipedia article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_C%C3%A9zanne

The Guardian (16 January 2002) ‘The real thing. Cézanne that eluded Nazis goes on show’, retrieved 1 September 2012 from  http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2002/jan/16/maevkennedy

Ashmolean Museum of Art & Architecture, Paintings Collection
http://www.ashmolean.org/ash/objects/?mu=130

Ashmolean Museum of Art & Architecture, Cézanne in the Drawings Collection
http://www.ashmolean.org/php/makegall.php?db=wadrawings&view=llisti&all=&arti=cezanne&titl=&mat=&prov=&sour=&coll=&acno=&strt=1&s1=&s2=&s3=&dno=&what=Search