Emile Nolde is one of the best known German Expressionist artists.  Expressionism was  one of several early twentieth century art movements.  Artists such as Munch and Kandinsky, wanted their work to express their personal, emotional response to nature and to the human situation, rather than simply to reproduce realistically what they saw. A significant inspiration for the expressionists was primitive art from Africa and the South Pacific, newly available in Paris.  They recognized an elemental human response was missing in European art.  Nolde wrote, “What looks convincingly true to nature in the old painting is infinitely removed from it.”  Expressionists exaggerated color, distorted the figure, ignored natural light and three-dimensional space, and they sought to cause the viewer to reach an emotional rather than an intellectual response.  Nolde’s visits to the Ethnological Museum in Paris, and 1913 trip to the South Pacific which passed through Russia, China, Java and Burma was his major influence.  In his autobiography he wrote, “primitive men live in their nature: they are one with it and part of the entire universe. I sometimes have the feeling that they are the only real human beings left, while we are something like malformed marionettes, artificial and full of presumption.”

Born in Nolde, a town on the Danish/German border, he grew up with the legends of the Norse gods, which must have conflicted intellectually with his extremely rigid Protestant upbringing.  His parents were simple peasants and they did not understand his desire to be an artist. As a compromise, he studied to be a woodcarver and an illustrator.  He worked in several furniture factories and taught drawing.  In 1898, his application to the Munich Academy was rejected and in 1899, he was unsuccessful as a student at the Academia Julien in Paris.  

He was determined to become a painter and more specifically to represent a new German art. By 1900, he developed an intimate and mystically inspired association with nature: “I had an infinite number of visions at this time, for wherever I turned my eyes, nature, the sky, the clouds were alive; in each stone and in the branches of every tree, everywhere my figures stirred and lived there still or wildly animated life, and they aroused my enthusiasm as well as tormented me with their demands that I paint them.” On another occasion he wrote his fiancé that  “The wind began to blow, the clouds grew wild and dark, a storm blew up, and the grayish sand was whirling high above the dunes and the houses.  A raging storm _ then suddenly my brush ripper through the canvas.  I came back to myself, I looked around me:  the sun was still beautiful and calm; I had lived through a storm in my imagination and been carried away…The picture was gone.  That’s the kind of thing that happens to me.”

Nolde, by choice, lived a reclusive life.  He engaged for short intervals with other like minded artists including Munch, Kandinsky and the Blue Rider.  After a brief time in public life, he always retreated with his wife to a solitary life on the Island of Alsen on the Black Sea. In 1902, as he became a known artist, he signed his work Nolde, in recognition of his home town.

From 1910-1916, his search for significant subject matter led to create several paintings on New Testament themes, but his raw brushstrokes, bright colors and crude primitive figures where rejected by the churches to which he offered them.  I

In 1906-07, he had written that when painting flowers,” I felt as if they loved my hands.”   By 1916, he rejected religious subject matter and turned back to nature and to his love of strong colors. “Color the material of the painter:  color in their own lives, weeping and laughing, dreams and bliss, hot and sacred, like love songs and the erotic, like songs and glorious chorals!  Color is vibration, peeling like silver bells and clanging like bronze bells, proclaiming happiness, passion and love, soul, blood, and death.”  IN 1927, the Noldes bought land in Seebuhl, on the German side of the Danish/German border.  Here they lived a secluded life.  He designed the house with extensive gardens and there he painted hundreds of flowers and paintings of the sea.  

Nolde’s politics were controversial.  In the early 1920’s, as a proud German who wanted to create a German art, he supported the National Socialist German Worker’s Party, the Danish section.  He was anti-Semitic and believed in the theory of racial superiority.  In August 1934, he signed the “Call to the Artists,” which meant he accepted Hitler as the German leader.  Ironically, Hitler called his art ‘degenerate’, confiscated 1,052 of his works from museums and ordered him not to paint anymore.  Many of Nolde’s paintings were included in the now famous 1937, Degenerate Art Exhibition.  Nolde was denounced more than any of the other artists. Many historians have researched his autobiography and writing and it is still undetermined where his real sympathies lay and why.

Having been forbidden to paint, he and his wife retreated to their isolated home where their life was difficult.  He began his series of “unpainted pictures”, small watercolors of flowers and the sea.  These are the images used in this article.  His inspiration never flagged.  In1942, he wrote, “There is silver blue, sky blue and thunder blue.  Every color holds with it a soul, which makes me happy or repels me, and which acts as stimulus.  To a person who has no art in him, colors are colors, tones tones…and that is all.  All their consequences for the human spirit which range between heaven to hell, just go unnoticed.”

Just before the end of WWII, his studio in Berlin where he stored his finished work was bombed.  Over 3000 of his graphic works, watercolors, and drawing were destroyed, along with the works of several other artists, including Paul Klee, whose works were stored there.  After liberation in 1945, he began to make oil paintings of his watercolors.  He painted over 100 oils in the last 6 years of his life.  Later, he was awarded the Pour le Merite medal, established in 1740 by Frederick II of Prussia, in recognition of extraordinary personal achievement.  Other recipients include Alfred Einstein and Kathe Kollwitz.

Nolde’s vision of nature is extraordinary.  His work, no matter how large or how small, is charged with  energy and passion. Having discovered and admired his work long before knowing anything about the artist, his paintings never stop resonating.  Nolde the man was a challenging individual.  Most of his life he chose separation and isolation from people.  The exception was his wife.  Never-the-less, his art stands alone and beyond the man.  His work was inspired by his deep connection to nature and he had the exceptional ability to render that passion for us to see.

Beverly Hall Smith was a professor of art history for 40 years.  Since retiring with her husband Kurt to Chestertown six years ago, she has taught art history classes at WC-ALL and Chesapeake College’s Institute for Adult Learning.  She is also an artist whose work is sometimes in exhibitions at Chestertown RiverArts and she paints sets for the Garfield Center for the Arts.

Remedias Varo is one of a number of women Surrealist painters who were equally a part of the movement but unfortunately are much less known today.  She came into contact with Surrealism in Spain and in Paris.  One of her marriages was to Benjamin Peret, a Surrealist poet and close friend of Breton, the leader of the Surrealists.  Surrealism began after WWI when the ideas of Sigmund Freud concerning the subconscious mind were taken seriously.  In the 1924 Surrealist Manifesto, Breton stated the need to “resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality.”  Put simply, the concrete realities of the conscious mind and the fantasy and dreams of the subconscious mind needed to be brought together to create a unified whole.

From her childhood onward, Varo was intellectually curious and a prolific reader.  As a child she read Jules Verne, Edgar Allen Poe, Alexander Dumas, and later she studied math, alchemy, mythology, mysticism, religions, Karl Jung, Isaac Asimov and others. She even had a make believe Hindu friends.  Her mother was a Catholic and she was raised in that faith, but left them in favor of the Universalist and liberal ideas of her father.  Her intellectual pursuits were encouraged by her father, a hydraulic engineer, who took her to South Africa.  She copied his blue prints for projects, learned technical drawing and became interested in machines. During the rise of Fascism in Spain, she fled to Paris only to be imprisoned in Paris by the Nazi’s.  She managed to escape, lived in hiding, and was able to get to Mexico in 1941with the aid of international agencies helping artists and Jews to escape. She lived and worked in Mexico City with a number of other Surrealist artists until her death in 1963.  These influences and life experiences permeate her paintings.  However, unlike the unease and fright produced by Dali’s art, Varo sought to reconcile the conscious and subconscious into a new, hopeful and harmonious union.

Varo’s “Harmony” was painted in 1956, and it illustrates the power of music, one of the significant influences in her life.   Music represented organized harmony and equaled wholeness. In this painting an androgynous figure is seated before a measure of a musical score, and appears to be in the process of creating a composition. The treble clef appears to be made of wood and is extended on both ends to become a horn.  The notes are a unique and significant combination of items. A rose, an ivy leaf, and a turnip are growing things.  The rose is universally identified as a symbol of the Virgin Mary; she is the rose without thorns and the base word for the rosary.  Ivy is an ancient symbol, it is every green it represents fidelity.  It is often used in wreaths and crowns and climbs up and clings to walls.   In Tarot, turnip seeds are a source of immortality. Other notes are represented by crystals, pyramids, circular stones and pieces of paper, one of which has the numbers of Pi written on it.  All of these items are strung on the lines making one think of an abacus.  A solid wall behind the musical composition dissolves as a graceful spirit woman, clad in white and blue, comes through the wall and adds a seashell to the composition.  Sea shells reference water and world travel.  “Harmony” synthesizes religion, mythology, math and science, and much more.

Across the room a second spirit woman breaks through the wall and appears as a mirror image. Some of the floor tiles come loose as branches, flowers and fragile pieces of paper push their way into the room.  In nature we see plants pushing through cement and brick sidewalks and blooming through rocks and man-made surfaces. This could be interpreted as walls being destroyed, or in a positive interpretation which is in keeping with Varo’s art, man and nature are unified and need to work together to preserve life and harmony.

Also in the room is a yellow chest of drawers and an orange chest full of other objects which might be used to form notes.  On the back wall and on the front right wall we see books on shelves and an assortment of flasks, beakers and retorts used for alchemy and scientific research.  At first glance there appears to be a large eye at the top of the large book shelf, but on closer observation, it is a bed with two pillows.  A rope ladder hangs from one end, giving access to the bed. Three pieces of furniture are seen in the back corner:  a chair, a trunk and a uniquely shaped vessel on a pedestal.  As with all of Varo’s painting there are always things that remain a mystery and come into focus later.

Varo’s color choices are interesting and present another mystery.  The room is painted in a range of yellow to dark orange, warm colors of the sun.  A second range of color is from white to light grays and light blue.  White represents purity, grays are the colors of rocks and blue references the sky. It interesting to move your eyes across the painting and see what is painted in the yellow tones and what in the whites to blues.

Three other mysterious items are also present.  On the wall above the large book case are two Romanesque arches.  In the city of Angeles, where Varo lived as a child, the architecture was predominantly round Romanesque.  Varo kept a post card from Angeles with her always.  The shape of these double arches was used in Jewish art to illustrate the two tablets of the Ten Commandments.  Varo’s interest included knowledge of several religions.  In the right front a red chair, its top cushion ripped, reveals another eye.  On closer observation the ripped cushion as been appropriated by a bird looking after her children in the nest.  Another bird painted white and blue, flies out the open door of the room.   Does this bird take the new harmonious composition to the world in its song?  Is this bird possibly the blue bird of happiness?

Varo is one of my favorite artists and I have studied her work repeatedly and still find intriguing mysteries and have unanswered questions. Her art is as complex and unique as was the artist herself.  

Varo’s paintings, including “Harmony” are full of intriguing mysteries and unanswered questions.  Her art is as complex as the artist herself. 

Beverly Hall Smith was a professor of art history for 40 years.  Since retiring with her husband Kurt to Chestertown six years ago, she has taught art history classes at WC-ALL and Chesapeake College’s Institute for Adult Learning.  She is also an artist whose work is sometimes in exhibitions at Chestertown RiverArts and she paints sets for the Garfield Center for the Arts.

 

Rachel Ruysch was fortunate to grow up in the 17th century Dutch Republic where for the first time in Europe there was no King or Catholic Church to dominate their lives and the Dutch instituted universal education.  The Dutch were Protestants who won their freedom from the Catholic monarchy in 1648.  They established the first middle class society and economy where home ownership, small businesses, local governments and great opportunity for all became possible.  Dutch hard work and initiative enabled them to become the largest international trading economy in Europe.  Their East India and West India trading companies brought goods from all the know centers of the world to Dutch ports to be distributed from there to the rest of Europe.  

This brings us to the woman artists Rachel Ruysch.  Her father was a Professor of Botany and Anatomy who gathered a large collection of botanical samples and other natural history items, all made possible by extensive trade.  As a child Rachel helped to catalog these items and started to draw them.  Her talent was encouraged and she was taught by Wm van Aelst a well known painter. The middle class Dutch people had their own homes and money and wanted to decorate their homes with art and nice things and they could.  As a result a large art market soon arose.  As Protestant’s they wanted small house size paintings of subjects that had meaning to them.  They were the first to want landscapes of their towns and the land they owned,  genre scenes of their everyday lives and still-life paintings which showed the abundance of unique foods, Chinese porcelains, silver items and a large variety of newly imported goods.  Specifically they loved paintings of the new flowers which were imported in abundance.  

Enter the tulip* whose bulbs were a gift from Sultan Suliman XII of Persia to the Austrian Ambassador, who gave them to a Dutch friend who planted the first bulbs in Holland in 1593.  The beauty of the tulip took the Dutch by storm initiating the first real stock market which was dedicated only to tulip bulb purchases.  The desire for tulip bulbs raged for years until 1637 when the market for tulips crashed.  Most valued were the flames/variegated petals with an abundance of gorgeous colors and smells.  They were a status symbol.  Paintings of them never lost popularity in the art market.  [*The name tulip came from the word ‘tulipa’, the name for the Sultan’s turban which looks like a tulip bulb.]

Ruysch became one of the most popular still life painters in Holland specializing in informal bouquets of mixed flowers which included sea shells, lizards, butterflies and other small animals which she had studied as a child in her father’s collection.  Some flower painte’s used  formal arrangements and some studios were set up for several painters, each one specializing in one of two flowers, which they then added to a painting.  Not Rachel, she was recognized for her exquisite detail seen in each petal, leaf and object she painted.  Take note of the flame/variegated tulips in Rachel’s painting.  There are also roses, iris, a daisy, wheat, flies, a beetle, a bee, a butterfly, other new exotic flowers, and even small drops of dew on some of the petals of both leaves and flowers.  

 Rachel Ruysch enjoyed a steady patronage during her life time and received 750-1250 gilders per painting as compared to Rembrandt whose works sold for about 500 guilders.  In 1693 she married Jurian Pool II, a portrait painter, and they had 10 children.  Yes, she continued to paint and take care of the home.  Between 1708-1716 they left Amsterdam to become Court Painters to the Elector Palatine, Johann von Paflz, at the Court of Dusseldorf. When her husband died in 1716 she returned to Amsterdam and continued to paint.  She painted from the age of 15 until she was 83. She died at 86 in 1750.  Eleven poets wrote poems celebrating her art when she died.  Today there are somewhere between 200/250 of her paintings still extant.  You can google Rachel Ruysch to see some of those 250 paintings.

Beverly Hall Smith was a professor of art history for 40 years.  Since retiring with her husband Kurt to Chestertown six years ago, she has taught art history classes at WC-ALL and Chesapeake College’s Institute for Adult Learning.  She is also an artist whose work is sometimes in exhibitions at Chestertown RiverArts and she paints sets for the Garfield Center for the Arts.