NOLDE, Emil (Nolde, 1867 – Seebüll, 1956)
Emil Hansen, who would later adopt the artistic name of Emil Nolde, was born on 7 August 1867 in Nolde, a German town in Northern Friesland. His parents were farmers and he himself trained as a carpenter and wood carver in a Flensburg workshop from 1884 till 1888. During the following years he worked as a wood carver in various furniture factories in Germany. In 1892 he moved to Sankt Gallen, Switzerland, where he taught drawing and modelling for five years at the School of Fine and Applied Arts. Wishing to train as a painter with Franz von Stuck, in 1898 he moved to Munich, where he was later taught by Friedrich Fehr. In the following years he completed his training in the study of Adolf Hölzel in Dachau and at the Académie Julian in Paris. From 1901 Emil Nolde spent his life, entirely devoted to painting, between Denmark, Berlin and his native land, as well as in the Baltic island of Alsen, which he visited for the first time in 1903. In 1902 he married a Danish woman, Ada Vilstrup. In 1906 he became a member of the artistic association Brücke, founded a year earlier by Kirchner, Schmidt-Rottluff and other artists, pioneers of Expressionism in Dresden; he took part in its activities until late 1907. The years around 1910 were fruitful for Nolde’s work. He exhibited his paintings in the Berliner Secession until 1910, after which he joined the Neue Secession. In 1913 he undertook a long journey, accompanied by his wife, with an ethnological expedition to New Guinea; this offered him the possibility of travelling through Russia, Siberia, Japan and other places in Asia and the Pacific, until they reached the Palau Islands. Upon his return in Germany, Nolde worked in Alsen, later moving to Untenwart, on the Western coast of Schleswig; in 1926 he settled down in Seebüll.
When the Nazis assumed power he was forced to resign as a member of the Preußische Akademie der Künste, a post to which he had been appointed two years earlier. In 1937, 1052 works by Nolde were removed from the German museums and galleries, and he was outlawed as one of the “degenerate” artists; he was forbidden to paint, exhibit and sell his paintings. His studio in Berlin was destroyed during one of the 1944 air raids. Yet, after the war he still produced a great number of works. Nolde died on 13 April 1956 in Seebüll. His home in Seebüll houses the Stiftung Seebüll Ada und Emil Nolde.
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