Outsider art

The complexities of Schleswig-Holstein run deep. Here’s Emil Nolde, an artist born south of the German-Danish border and steeped in the marshy mysteries and primal romanticism of that landscape. In 1920, he sees his region, and himself, become Danish following a post-Versailles plebiscite. An already well-established German nationalist bent — pronounced despite, or perhaps because of, his shifting national identity and shaky grasp of the German language — is inflamed. He moves back across the new border before eventually joining the local branch of the Nazi party and writing a volume of autobiography entitled, Jahre der Kämpfe in which he rails against the Jewish dominance of the art world.

National Socialism attracted Nolde and he saw the Nazis as an opportunity for the German avant-garde. He envisaged his model of expressionism becoming the cultural face of the nation and a new wave of artists being empowered by the state to become the modern equals of Dürer, Grünewald and Holbein. The authorities rewarded this giddy optimism by confiscating more of Nolde’s works (1,052) than those of any other artist during the purge against ‘degenerate’ art and, from 1941, forbidding him to buy materials or engage in any professional artistic practice whatsoever.

It’s easy to see why Nolde’s relentless assault of thickly applied colour — lurid landscapes beneath sickly skies and crude, wide-eyed, yellow-skinned figures — offended Hitler’s plodding artistic ideals. The landscapes are turbulent places, his city dwellers dyspeptic, heavy-eyed barflies or decadent cabaret patrons. Most damning of all are the religious works, which converse far more readily with the emotionally agonised figures of Grünewald’s Northern Renaissance than they do with any Kinder, Küche, Kirche crap.