Back to Nature

Of all the members of Die Brücke and the entire German Expressionist movement, Emil Nolde worshiped the most at the altar of the church of Vincent Van Gogh. Born August 7, 1867, Nolde worked as a woodcarver until the woodcut prints he created sold well enough for him to study art formally in his early thirties, just when the posthumous Van Gogh craze, fueled by a recent German translation of the unforgettable letters, was at its height. “My aim,” Nolde later said of his art, is “a new evaluation of nature, with the infusion of personal soul and spirit.” Works such as Autumn Sea VII (above, from 1910) show Nolde infusing his “personal soul and spirit” into nature itself in the same way that Van Gogh once did. Although Nolde allowed himself to enter into Expressionist circles (at least for a couple of years), he remained a loner all of his life, much like Van Gogh, always looking for personal communion with nature itself free of all interference.

In addition to his Van Gogh-like traits, Nolde shared a love of the exotic with Van Gogh’s one-time companion, Paul Gauguin. In 1913, Nolde and his wife joined a German ethnological expedition to the South Seas, traveling as far as the East Indies. Despite his devout Christian faith, Nolde always found the primal energy of primitive civilizations fascinating. Nolde’s Wildly Dancing Children (above, from 1909) now seems like a prophesy of the images he would paint of dancing natives, who’s sense of sinlessness shook Nolde’s faith while simultaneously igniting his artistic imagination. Whereas Gauguin entered the primitive sphere and felt at home for the first time, Nolde never overcame his sense of alienation but recognized the raw beauty all the same. “Art is exalted above religions and races. Not a single solitary soul these days believes in the religions of the Assyrians, the Egyptians, and the Greeks. And their races are exhausted, crossbred and spoiled,” Nolde once wrote. “Only their art, whenever it was beautiful, stands proud and exalted, rising above all time.” By inches, Nolde’s Christian faith and artistic faith slowly reconciled, at least in his art if not his soul.

As beautiful as Nolde’s explosively colorful paintings are, none can match up to his devout woodcut titled The Prophet (above, from 1912), his finest single woodcut and perhaps the greatest of all German Expressionist woodcuts—no small achievement considering the many imitators who tried to match Nolde’s artistry. His fervid Christianity led him to break with the Berlin Secession in 1910 and its Jewish president, Max Liebermann. Sadly, Nolde aligned with the “Christian” forces of the Nazi party as early as the 1920s. The Nazis repaid Nolde’s loyalty by placing him on the list of "Degenerate Art," removing his art from German museums, and forbidding him to paint again under penalty of death. Many of the watercolors Nolde painted secretly during the war met a fiery end in allied bombing raids. After the war, Nolde received honors and found his reputation restored, but the taint of his dalliance with the Nazis still hangs over much of his art, robbing it of some of the brilliance it might have had if he had only remained faithful to his true religion of nature and art, “exalted” above all other religions and races.

From Left to Right

Critics dissect many artists into almost different people based on “periods.” I know of only one artist differentiated by which hand he painted with—Lovis Corinth. Born July 21, 1858, Corinth painted realist works with an almost sinister Symbolist feel such as Self-Portrait With Skeleton (above, from 1896) up until 1911, the year he suffered a stroke (perhaps hastened by his chronic alcoholism). Left with a partially paralyzed left side, including his painting hand, Corinth learned to paint with his right hand within a year with the love and support of his wife Charlotte Berend, herself an artist and Corinth’s former student. Painting with his naturally dominant left hand, Corinth worked in a mostly realistic style that borrowed from other movements such as Symbolism and Impressionism. Along with his friend, Max Liebermann, Corinth brought some of the first stirrings of Impressionism to Germany. Unlike Liebermann, however, Corinth saw the world in darker tones, recognizing the pain of life he experienced so closely firsthand.

The right-handed, post-stroke Corinth began to paint in a highly Expressionist style. Although almost an entire generation older than most other Expressionist artists in Germany, especially the artists of Der Blaue Reiter and Die Brücke, Corinth felt compelled to play the younger man’s game of angst and outrage. Corinth’s Cain (above, from 1917) strikingly depicts the pain and the defiance of the Biblical character. Painted in the midst of Germany’s involvement in World War I, it may also serve as a symbol of Germany’s own fratricidal guilt in ginning up the war fever that soon consumed all of Europe in the flames. Corinth watched an entire generation of young men, including many of the fine young Expressionist painters, die in the war. Already manic-depressive, Corinth’s natural pessimism grew even deeper during the war years.

Corinth died in 1925 while making a pilgrimage to Holland to see the works of Rembrandt, Rubens, Hals, and many other beloved influences. In that final year, Corinth painted his son in Thomas in Armor (above, from 1925), perhaps a satiric comment on a world that sends young men to battle. Trapped in an ailing body, Corinth turned inward and turned his art upside down, replacing finish with raw emotion. Like his beloved Rembrandt, Corinth painted himself over and over throughout his career, in all kinds of settings and in all moods, from bacchanalian to bleak. Corinth died before the Nazis’ ascension in Germany, so we’ll never know his judgment of them, but we know their judgment of him. When the Nazis wrote up the list of “Degenerate Art,” only those works by Corinth after 1911 were deemed improper, as if the paralysis from his stroke had actually killed the artist rather than freed him in a whole new way.

Getting Away

Best and brightest, come away,
Fairer far than this fair day,
Which, like thee, to those in sorrow
Comes to bid a sweet good-morrow
To the rough year just awake
In its cradle on the brake.

—From “The Invitation” by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Watching the Nazis march through the Brandenburg Gate in 1933 to celebrate Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, Max Liebermann said "I could not eat as much as I would like to vomit." Born July 20, 1847, Max Liebermann tried to bring the beauty of Impressionism to Germany in works such as Garden to the West of the Wannsee (above, from 1917). Liebermann built a home and garden on Lake Wannsee that served not only as his inspiration but also as a refuge from the turmoil of German society. Too old to fight in World War I and dead in 1935, years before World War II, Liebermann felt the sting of war’s effects all the same, especially the anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime, which forced him to give up his academic post when Jewish artists were forbidden to exhibit any longer. At a time when Expressionism and New Objectivity grabbed the spotlight in German art, Liebermann continued to look for a place in his homeland for Impressionism’s devotion to pure natural beauty.

Aside from his beautiful landscapes and seascapes, many of which feature children playing in the surf, Liebermann painted many striking portraits, including a portrait of the classical composer Richard Strauss (above, from 1918). Whereas the landscapes and seascapes follow the brand of Impressionism practiced by Monet and Renoir, Liebermann’s portraits show the influence of Edouard Manet with their dark backgrounds and psychologically astute portrayals. Strauss and Liebermann may have felt an artistic kinship, as both seemed to be behind the artistic times in their chosen fields as they held on to their signature styles as new schools passed them by. There’s a sadness in Strauss’ eyes that may mirror the sadness in Liebermann’s own, as Germany plunged into economic and political chaos in the wake of the punitive reparations imposed after World War I, which served to destabilize the country enough for Nazism to eventually capitalize on the situation.

Liebermann’s wife continued to live in their house on the Wannsee after the artist’s death. (Liebermann’s Garden and House in Wannsee is above, from 1918.) Little did she suspect that nearby Nazi leaders conducted in 1942 the infamous Wannsee Conference in which the “Final Solution” to the "Jewish Question" was decided. Hours before officials planned to take her away and add her to the Holocaust’s tally, Martha Liebermann took her own life in that Wannsee home in 1943. Today, the villa where Hitler and his henchmen planned the Holocaust is a center for education, just as the Liebermann home is now a memorial to the man and his art. Max Liebermann always saw the best and the brightest of Germany and captured it in his art, even in the darkest of days.