Emil Nolde Lot n° 47

Emil Nolde Sea Landscape with Steamer and Sailboat 1946 Watercolour on Japanese paper 21,6 x 26 cm Signed 'Nolde' in black lower right. Provenance Received directly from the artist, Mathias Wiemann, Potsdam/Zurich; since then family property, through inheritance private collection Canada Watercolour occupies a high place in Emil Nolde's oeuvre, one can almost speak of a trademark. Compared to oil painting, it is a much freer and more spontaneous medium and can be used almost anywhere. During his stay in Berlin in 1910, for example, Nolde captured numerous theatre and concert scenes - equipped with a watercolour box and small pieces of paper, in the rows of seats in the dark auditorium. Watercolor painting became more important as a medium that could be quickly implemented during the medical-demographic expedition of 1912-1914, to which the painter was invited in order to visually record this scientific journey. It took him via China and Japan to Papua New Guinea, among other places. In the Chinese sea, not only the changing atmospheric plays of light and color fascinate him, but also the typical shapes of the ships and junks. "The watercolor grants the highest freedom and yet at the same time denies almost any possibility of correction [...]. Quick decisions [...] are as important as patience in waiting. [...] The watercolor is the congenial medium when it comes to the self-worth and immateriality of color and the expression of subjectivity." (Nils Ohlsen, Magician of the Watercolour, in: Astrid Becker/Christian Ring (eds.), Emil Nolde. Glühender Farbrausch, Cologne 2018, p. 14). The artist studied in depth the watercolor work of the English painter Turner, who transposed seascapes like no other. "Both [are] not concerned with exact description, but with the subjective transposition of the atmosphere in the face of the force of nature [...]. It is in his watercolours of the sea that Nolde comes closest to abstraction. In some of the sheets painted in St. Peter, isolated steamers reduced to hieroglyphics in the endless distance are the only representational clues." (op.cit., p. 30) The interest in sea and shipping motifs awakened on the occasion of the South Seas expedition continues to have an effect in Nolde's subsequently emerging work. This becomes very clear with the watercolour offered here, which was painted within the series of seascapes painted in St. Peter in 1946. Sharply delineated, the small red sail of the boat is the only solid body of color in the gently flowing, exotic-looking colors in a spectrum of blue-turquoise and violet-pink-orange in spatial relation to the black clouds of the steamer. The watercolour was given to the German Ufa actor Mathias Wiemann, whom Emil Nolde had met and befriended in Vienna in 1942, on the occasion of Nolde's 80th birthday in 1947 (with regard to his stay in Vienna, see Emil Nolde, Reisen. Ostracism. Befreiung 1919-1946, Cologne 1967, p. 127 ff.). The painting "Zwiegespräch" was also created for Wiemann in 1946 (Martin Urban, Emil Nolde, Werkverzeichnis der Gemälde, Munich 1990, no. 1277).