Art: German Expressionist

In the 1890s, when Pablo Picasso was a pup, a Schleswig-German artist named Emil Nolde began experimenting. He distorted forms, rearranged figures, changed colors—innovations with which Picasso was later credited by the uninformed. Artist Nolde, father of German “Expressionism,” lived through World War I, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich. When in 1937 the Nazis held a finger-pointing exhibit of “Degenerate Art” in Munich, Nolde was naturally included.

Last week Chicago’s Katherine Kuh Galleries held a one-man Nolde show. The pictures, all water colors, covered Nolde’s work from 1914 to 1930. Although some of them—two parakeets, a sheaf of poppy blossoms—were untypically delicate and representational, most would have given Art Critic Hitler the galloping creeps. Head of a Woman (see cut) had a green face, red highlights in the black hair. In Small Girl With Tulips, the sad-looking child was colored a greyish blue, in contrast with the yellow and green flowers. Purely as water colors, the pictures were brilliant and velvety, carefully brushed on Japanese paper soaked in water. They confirmed what Nolde wrote of himself: “The devil lives in his limbs, divinity in his heart. . . . He sees not much, but other men see nothing.”

Among Emil Nolde’s fellow German “degenerates,” Oskar Kokoschka escaped to London, Satirist George Grosz settled and calmed down in the U. S., Ernst Kirchner died of tuberculosis in exile. Karl Hofer, onetime Carnegie International prize winner is still in Germany, has been forbidden to paint. Artist Nolde, now 73, is still in Germany too. But he gets along very well. He is a Nazi Party member. Although he is officially banned, he paints what he likes, sells it while Nazis look the other way. Reason: Hermann Göring collects Nolde paintings.