Emil Nolde

Emil Nolde was born Hans Emil Hansen on 7 August 1867 in the village of Nolde, near Buhrkall/Tønder in Schleswig, then part of Prussia, into a peasant farming family. He adopted the name Emil Nolde in 1902, taking it from his birthplace, and went on to become one of the defining figures of German Expressionism, working across painting, printmaking, and watercolor until his death on 13 April 1956 in Seebüll, Schleswig-Holstein. In recognition of his standing in postwar German culture, he received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, the country's highest civilian decoration.

Nolde's painted work is distinguished above all by its ferocious chromatic intensity and its willingness to push figuration toward emotional and spiritual extremity. His religious canvases of the years around 1909 to 1912 — among them Das Abendmahl, Pfingsten, and Kreuzigung — shattered the conventions of academic devotional painting through violently heightened color, compressed compositions, and contorted figures that convey anguish and ecstatic vision in equal measure. Alongside these works, his large flower paintings such as Große Sonnenblumen transformed the still-life tradition into an arena of pure chromatic force. Between 1913 and 1914, travels to the South Seas produced a body of work — including Tropical Sun and South Sea Landscape — that has since become central to scholarly discussions of European modernism and its engagement with non-European cultures. As a printmaker, Nolde achieved comparable authority: the 1912 woodcut Der Prophet, with its stark frontal head and severe black-and-white contrasts, is among the most celebrated prints in the German Expressionist canon and is held in major print collections including that of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. During the years 1938 to 1945, working under a Nazi-imposed painting ban, he produced the series known as the Ungemalte Bilder — small, intensely colored watercolors made in secret, now held primarily at the Nolde Museum Seebüll. His late flower watercolors, including works from the Seebüll Garden series, are regarded as a pinnacle of his achievement in the medium; works on paper by Nolde are held at Tate, London, as well as at MoMA.

The Ada and Emil Nolde Foundation, established by Emil and Ada Nolde in Seebüll in 1946, serves as the primary custodian of his estate, administering his works, archives, and the museum at Seebüll. The foundation has been the organizing partner for major institutional exhibitions, including the solo presentation Emil Nolde. Man – Nature – Myth at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart in Berlin, a retrospective at the Galeries nationales du Grand Palais in Paris in 2008, and a subsequent showing at the Musée Fabre in Montpellier in 2009. Recent years have seen sustained institutional attention: Emil Nolde: Welt und Heimat opened at Museum Würth 2 in Künzelsau in April 2025, presenting 128 works from Seebüll, while five paintings from the foundation traveled to Villa Manin in Passariano di Codroipo for the group exhibition Boundaries. From Turner to Monet to Hopper, running from October 2025 into 2026. On the gallery side, Nolde's work is represented by Galerie Ludorff in Düsseldorf — which mounted the group exhibition 50 Jahre. Part I in 2025 and the solo focus Season of Colours in 2026 — as well as by Bastian Gallery in Berlin, Galerie Utermann in Dortmund, and Galerie Herold in Kampen, where the 2025 exhibition Emil Nolde und Weggefährten placed his work alongside that of his contemporaries.