Skip to main content

Emil Nolde – Colour is Life

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Modern 2, Edinburgh until October 21st
Four stars

Sex, God and the transcendent tangle of both are the prime pulses behind this collection of more than 100 paintings, drawing, watercolours and prints by one of Germany’s most significant expressionists, brought together in all their contrary glory. Here, after all, is an artist who put faith in National Socialism in the hope that avant-garde art would become a central tenet of government thinking, but whose abstractions were ridiculed in the Nazis’ notorious 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition.

Despite this, a primal fervour remained at the heart of Nolde’s work both before and after being officially black-balled from the art world in ways that all but bursts through the frame. This is the case with the self-deification of Free Spirit (1906) as much as the rapture of Ecstasy (1929), in which a naked Mary is painted at the point of conceiving Jesus, and the sensory abandonment of Candle Dancers (1912). In terms of come-down, Paradise Lost (1921) finds a terrified-looking Adam and Eve hunched on the ground, side by side but very much apart as they guiltily regret the night before.

For all the brutal grotesquery of Nolde’s ‘Unpainted Pictures’, made during his artistic exile, Nolde’s pursuit of intimacy is best captured in Young Couple (1913), eight lithographs of the same image in different colours. Seen side by side, they resemble a Jules Feiffer party scene that perfectly encapsulates Nolde’s ever-changing moods. 

The List, July 2018



ends
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug...
2 comments
Read more

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h...
Post a Comment
Read more