Art Review : Revealing Look at a German Expressionist

Much of the great art that came from the German Expressionist movement depicts the life and myth of cities, especially Berlin. It was a yeasty and deliciously decadent place before World War II, but the art about it is decidedly ill at ease. It’s almost as if, in their heart of hearts, the artists wanted to be elsewhere. Emil Nolde knew where that was. It was in the fertile land where the German peasant heart is rooted. He was born there and, in spirit, never left.

Now the L.A. County Museum of Art is presenting a landmark exhibition of his art, “Emil Nolde: The Painter’s Prints.” Despite Los Angeles’ status as a center for German pioneer modernism, this show is a revelation. Organized in tandem by LACMA and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston where it debuted, it was put together as a collaboration between their curator Clifford S. Ackley and two of ours, Timothy O. Benson and Victor Carlson. At about 150 etchings, woodcuts and lithographs, it is the first major American exhibition devoted to Nolde’s graphic art and therefore fills a large gap in our direct experience of one of Germany’s renowned masters.

Nolde was born Emil Hansen in 1867 to a family of peasant farmers who for nine generations had tilled the land around a tiny village near the German-Danish border. Eventually he took the name of that village as his own, signaling his attachment to the land.

By family standards, he was a rebel who left the farm to become an outlandish thing called an artist. He apprenticed to a furniture maker, learned woodcarving and studied art. His first big break came when, at 30, working in Munich, he made a line of novelty postcards depicting mountains turning into caricatured people. A printing of 100,000 promptly sold out. Clearly a hit as a popular visual entertainer, Nolde nonetheless used his profit to strike out as an independent artist.

This exhibition opens with a crayon transfer lithograph related to the postcards. Titled “Mountain Giant and Giantess,” it shows a grizzled old peak in amorous dalliance with a pretty young hill. Clearly a gag, it nonetheless expresses themes that would stick in Nolde’s oeuvre --earthiness, monumentality, fantasy and strong character.

Nearing 40, Nolde met the much younger artists of the Dresden Brucke group. They looked up to him as an established artist, but he didn’t hesitate to learn about woodcutting from them. The in-built directness and drama of the technique seems to have affected his work in other media. He took the powerhouse punch of woodcutting and combined it with the precision of etching and suppleness of lithography. Beyond that, the technique of an image matters far less than what it expresses.

The five galleries housing the exhibition are parceled out thematically. Perhaps the most directly memorable is a grouping of landscapes. In 1910, Nolde visited Hamburg, making a suite of images around its port. Heavily silhouetted scenes of wharves, steamers and sinister water throb with the romance of the seafarers’ life with its alternating attraction for far-off places and safe harbor at home. The images become testament to a way of life that is in a state of perpetual longing. There is something very youthful about them.

Some 15 years later he virtually ended his career as a printmaker with a series of scenes of windmills on the North Sea coast near his birthplace. They are stark, austere and still. They seem the vision of a wanderer who has come home. He’s seen it all, knows it all and realizes there is nothing to life but experience and experience is enough. The images have the naivete of real wisdom.

Nolde’s art never strays far from the elemental. When he looks at human character, it’s with the eye of the peasant, hard-headed and quick to nail all vanity and pretense. A flirtatious young couple preens for each other. Nolde seems to chuckle and think, “Yup, just like the birds at mating season.” Like Edvard Munch, he was fascinated with the image of the eternal female, unlike him he didn’t find her neurotic and terrifying. A color-variation suite, “Young Danish Woman,” brings to mind similar work by Alexi Jawlensky, but Nolde stops short of turning females into icons.

Not that he was a moderate. He loved the grotesque and the violent. In 1913, he and his wife joined an expedition that took them from Siberia to Java and Burma. It resulted in such prints as “Candle Dancers,” among the most direct images of humans in a primal state of sexual frenzy.

Not that he was immoral. His biblical scenes are numerous and moving, but images like “Prophet” emphasize the volcanic passion and frightening strength of moral conviction.

For decades it was rumored that Nolde was a Nazi or at least sympathetic to its ethos. The latest scholarship holds he was never a party member, and if he was momentarily attracted to Hitler’s impassioned rhetoric, well, so were a lot of people who didn’t know where it was leading.

In 1937, the artist’s works were confiscated from museums and put on view in Hitler’s notorious “Degenerate Art” exhibition. He was forbidden to paint, exhibit or sell. He continued in secret at his home in Seebul, where he died at 88.

The exhibition comes with a valuable 300-page catalogue. A related exhibition from the Rifkind Center in nearby galleries, “Expressionist Affinities: Nolde’s Contemporaries,” fleshes out the experience.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., through Sept. 10, closed Monday, (213) 857-6000.