Vibrant colors – free spirit: Emil Nolde and the Expressionist figure painting
Nolde is widely regarded as the leading expressionist painter of flowers and landscapes. He is famous for his countless paintings and watercolors depicting the overwhelming, seemingly endless splendor of the blooms in his country garden. Starting in 1916, Nolde and his wife, Ada, settled in Untenwarf, near the Danish border, and in 1927, they eventually moved into their newly built home and studio in Seebüll. From at least 1916 through the 1950s, Nolde became a celebrated Nordic flower and landscape painter who, in his floral arrangements, cloud formations, and atmospheric lighting, repeatedly celebrated the unique expressive quality of colors. Amid all the admiration for the beauty of the flower and landscape paintings, the fact that Nolde’s Expressionist work reached its absolute peak in his figurative compositions of the 1910s—rather than in these works—is often overlooked. Nolde was in his early 40s and had already produced an early body of Impressionist work when his Expressionist figure painting “Pfingsten” (1909, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin) was rejected by the jury of the Berlin Secession, led by Max Liebermann, for the 1910 summer exhibition. Following an insulting letter to Liebermann, in which Nolde denounced Liebermann’s Impressionist painting as weak and kitschy, Nolde was expelled from the Berlin Secession and was subsequently represented primarily with Expressionist figure paintings at the exhibitions of the “Neue Secession”. Founded as a protest movement in 1910, the “Neue Secession” brought together members of the young “Brücke” group and other Expressionist painters. Nolde’s particular strength of expression lies in conveying a deeply emotional atmosphere on the canvas through the most liberated use of color and form. Nolde’s figures are not beautiful ideals—they are condensations of the human condition in all its complexity: fear, faith, temptation, and demonic forces. By 1915, he had refined this visual language to a richness and mastery that was beyond dispute. And so he began to elevate his figures increasingly toward an emotionally charged typification of the human condition, and, above all, the spiritual, biblical themes—which transcend all earthly matters in their despair, their fear, but also their strength and hope—that ultimately led Nolde to his outstanding expressionist style in the mid-1910s.


Nolde and the feminine: spirituality, mysticism, sensuality, and ecstasy
The painting “Tanz um das Goldene Kalb” (Dance Around the Golden Calf, 1910, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich), created in the year the “Neue Secession” was founded, must have struck viewers at the time like a thunderclap: Naked and ecstatic, women in bright yellow and red, their black and red hair swaying, dance around the golden calf. They become a pictorial symbol of freedom, wildness, and lust. The same year, Nolde painted “Christ and the Children” (1910, Museum of Modern Art, New York), which contrasts the unconditional primal trust and hope of the brightly lit children on one side with the mistrust, timidity, and fear of the disciples in the darkness on the other. Once again, Nolde masterfully captured pure emotion, freely and directly on the canvas, through spontaneous brushstrokes, bold colors, and raw, stylized forms, entirely in the spirit of Expressionism. Building on biblical themes, Nolde expanded his expressionist depiction of human emotions to the secular realm in the years that followed. His painting is about fear, courage, love, and eros, and thus always also about the various facets of femininity. The composition of Nolde's painting “Three Women” is grand, radiant, and enigmatic. Even though Nolde arranged the three women in a relationship that seems almost like a dance, which, despite the unsettling motifs, evokes associations with the art-historical tradition of the “Three Graces” at first glance, they still appear emotionally isolated and disconnected. It is almost impossible to escape the menacing force emanating from the central figure, shrouded entirely in black. Dressed in deep black—facing forward, with a dark gaze directed straight at the viewer, self-contained and almost threatening—this is not a figure in the academic sense, nor is she an exoticized stranger. The two women at her sides, in stark profile, their elongated forms set against a luminous sky blue, take the composition’s tension into mystical realms. The work is not about beauty, but about mystery, the indomitable, that eludes any rational interpretation. Nolde was at the peak of his creative powers when he dared to juxtapose the luminous, almost monochromatic swaths of color in radical ways, combining them to create an outstanding Expressionist composition that embodies not only his fascination with the foreign but, above all, with the feminine. “Three Women” is a powerful work that captures the mysterious and foreign in all its facets, with its enigmatic allure and the eerie abysses of life. Nolde condensed all the themes and emotional levels into a pictorial distillation that was a defining feature of his Expressionist painting of the 1910s—and which we still encounter, among other works, in his mysterious female character portraits of the late 1910s: the woman as both seduction and threat, as a demonic temptress and a mysterious mystical force.


“Three Women”: The fascination with the exotic and Nolde’s South Seas journey
In 1915, the year “Three Women” was created, Nolde drew on a wealth of experiences, memories, and sensory impressions from distant lands. This was because he had set out on a year-long voyage to the South Seas with his wife Ada in October 1913. The Noldes were participants in the “Medical-Demographic German New Guinea Expedition”, from which the couple was not scheduled to return to Berlin until September 1914—that is, after the outbreak of World War I. Nolde’s route took him via Moscow, Siberia, Manchuria, Korea, and Japan to China and on to (then) German New Guinea, with stops on the Gazelle Peninsula, New Mecklenburg, and the Admiralty Islands. On their return journey from the South Seas in the summer of 1914, the Noldes were caught off guard by the outbreak of World War I while in the Suez Canal. They returned to Europe on a Dutch steamship and arrived back in Berlin in mid-September. In the months that followed, including during his stay on the island of Alsen, Nolde created works inspired by a journey that had opened up a whole new world to him. In “Three Women”, Nolde intertwined a wide variety of cultural impressions from the most diverse regions of his journey into an emotionally intense, expressionist whole, thereby capturing everything that, in his own words, had constituted the special allure of this great journey when he set out in October 1913: “It was on October 2, 1913, when at 1 a.m. the long-distance train whistled for departure at Zoo Station. […] The train rumbled into the night. Our thoughts went with it into the unknown, the foreign, the exciting. […].“ (Emil Nolde, Welt und Heimat. Die Südseereise, 1913–1918, Cologne 1965, p. 15).


Shortly after its creation, “Three Women” was exhibited in Germany’s leading Expressionist galleries—at Ludwig Schames’s gallery in Frankfurt and at Hans Goltz’s in Munich. In 1922, the painting was acquired by Dr. Josef Esters of Krefeld, one of the Rhineland's most important patrons of modern art. Esters was a close friend of the collector Hermann Lange, with whom he commissioned the construction of two adjacent, architecturally avant-garde residences in Krefeld based on designs by Mies van der Rohe; these were intended to provide a suitable space not only for the family but also for their art collection. Today, the two houses are known as the ‘Museums House Lange and House Esters’, serving as a museum of contemporary art. From Esters, the painting passed to Lionel C. Epstein in Washington, D.C., another significant collector of modern art, and is now on public view for the first time after more than 40 years in a renowned Northern European private collection. [JS]