CONTENT

In 1941, the president of the Reichs Chamber of the Visual Arts in Berlin prohibited Emil Nolde, “effective immediately, from all professional activities in the field of the visual arts.” “I was in the midst of beautiful, productive painting when this ban on painting and selling arrived. The brush fell out of my hand,” Nolde recalled. “With a sword hanging over my head, movement and freedom were taken from me.” Nolde continued to paint during the eight years of his ostracism in a remote chamber of his home in Seebüll.
He called the small-format watercolours and gouaches that were sometimes no larger than the palm of his hand ‘unpainted pictures.’ More than 1,300 ‘unpainted pictures’ were produced during the time of the painting ban. “The small works on paper … provided me with great pleasure personally and as a painter. It regularly occurred that I stood there, and was surprised almost without knowing it about that what I had invented.” The exhibition displays more than 100 of the ‘unpainted pictures’ – most of them for the first time – as well as selected oil paintings made before and after the painting ban.

– The legendary late work
– With more than 50 unpublished works

Editor
Manfred Reuther, born 1944. Studied at the Art Academy Düsseldorf as well as at the universities of Marburg and Tübingen. Director of the Nolde Foundation, Seebüll, since 1992. Publications on the life and work of the painter Emil Nolde, German expressionism and contemporary art.

Author
Jörg Garbrecht, born 1976. Doctorate on Eric Fischl at Oxford University. Tutor for contemporary art at Oxford University. Project management for the Tate Modern, the State Museums Berlin and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He has been a member of the staff of the Nolde Foundation Seebüll for public relations and marketing since 2005 and also curator of the Berlin Branch since 2007.

About the Author

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