Nolde's art reflects a life spent shuttling between the raw nature of the Nordic coast and the metropolis of Berlin. He portrays the people of his native rural villages with powerful gravity, using a consciously archaic style,while the city types are captured with nervous, vibrating brushstrokes. Nolde observes the natives he encounters on his voyage to New Guinea in 1913-14 with fascination.

Emil Nolde, one of the most important Expressionists, became famous--indeed popular--through his pictures of landscapes, flowers,and religious subjects. However, the portrait also represents an outstanding genre in the oeuvre of this north German artist, especially during his early phase.The portraits demonstrate particularly powerfully the authenticity and directness of Nolde"s painting. For that reason we are pleased to be able to show in our exhibition about fifty of the inimitable portraits on canvas that Nolde painted between 1903 and 1918. Previous exhibitions and publications have treated many different aspects of Nolde"s work in great detail, but this is the first presentation of Nolde as a portrait painter. Nolde"s art reflects a life spent shuttling between the raw nature of the Nordic coast and the metropolis of Berlin. He portrays the people of his native rural villages with powerful gravity, using a consciously archaic style,while the city types are captured with nervous, vibrating brushstrokes. Nolde observes the natives he encounters on his voyage to New Guinea in 1913-14 with fascination.Lovingly he paints his wife, Ada. Her portrait of 1903 is the earliest in the exhibition, which concludes with the famous double portrait Brother and Sister from 1918. And again and again we have Nolde himself before us, gazing intensely out of his self-portraits.

VORWORT

FOREWORD

Tilman Osterwold

EMIL NOLDE - SPRACHEN DER PORTRATS

EMIL NOLDE--THE LANGUAGE OF THE PORTRAITS

Brigitte Reinhardt

EMIL NOLDE - DIE FRAU IM PORTRAT

NOLDE"S PORTRAITS OF WOMEN

Manfred Reuther

EMIL NOLDE BIOGRAFISCHE UBERSICHT

EMIL NOLDE BIOGRAPHICAL OVERVIEW

AUSGESTELLTEWERKE / WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION

BIBLIOGRAFIE/ BIBLIOGRAPHY