Pictures of flowers and gardens

From childhood onwards, Emil Nolde was closely associated with nature - this intimate relationship characterised him deeply and strongly influenced his artistic creativity. On the Baltic Sea island of Alsen, in 1906, he painted his first pictures of flowers and gardens, by means of which he discovers colour as his true means of expression. “Colours, a painter’s material: colours in their independent existence, crying and laughing, dream and happiness, hot and holy like love songs and erotic, like chants and beautiful hymns”, he writes.

And wherever the painter settled down, he laid out flower gardens, on Alsen island, later in front of his Utenwarf house and far more wilfully and more abundantly around his Seebüll residential building and studio. They inspired the great magician of colours to his luminous paintings and virtuoso watercolours of flowers, most of which have been created right before nature. “The colours of the flowers attracted me in an irresistible way, and all of a sudden I was painting… The blooming colours of the flowers and the purity of these colours, I loved them”, he confesses.

“Nolde’s pictures of flowers and gardens are not inferior to the other work in their artistic status and importance” according to Professor Dr. Manfred Reuther, Director of the Nolde Foundation Seebüll. “In his watercolour painting, Nolde pursues the theme up to his old-age, up to his last works.”

In spring 1916, Emil Nolde moves from Alsen island to the Utenwarf farmhouse, near the North Sea and lays out a magnificent garden, which inspires him to numerous pictures of flowers and gardens. In the summer of 1922, a series of impressive pictures of flower gardens is created, which the painter designates by means of an alphabetic count, including the exhibited painting “Flower garden (O)”. A lavishly designed, rhythmically structured picture arrangement with plain colour surfaces resulted from the shimmering coloured light, the painting method using small sections and the diffuse spatiality of earlier flower pictures. Complementary contrasts increase the luminance of the colours. Nolde freed himself more and more from the subject-matter of the picture and developed an independent visual language, inspired by external nature. Either he paints under the open sky in the garden or in the studio, where he develops and completes the drafts and visual ideas detached from his stay in the garden. He lets himself be guided by his own imagination and tries to reproduce the nature that he saw “in his own special way” and “in his spiritual translation” without giving up the direct connection with it.