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