Emil Nolde

Grovesnor Gallery, London
Sale: Finarte, Milan, November 22, 1961, lot 110
Dr. Benfer, Italy
Private Collection, Europe (by descent from the above and sold: Sotheby's, Paris, June 1, 2011, lot 54)
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Executed on wove paper, laid down on board. There are some faint flattened creases, mostly in the upper right quadrant, and a slight waviness to the sheet in the lower left corner, which are inherent to the laying down process. Apart from some minor rubbing marks along the edges and some light time-staining, this work is in good condition.
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Sonnenbluhmen is an outstanding example of Emil Nolde's series of depictions of sunflowers, on which the painter embarked in the mid-1920s and which he continued over the following twenty years of his life. In the present work Nolde brilliantly captures the flowers' vitality in all their detail. The powerful energy emanating from the image illustrates the artist's awareness of nature around him as both a passionate gardener and a masterful painter. He would take as a starting point easily identified localities or close-ups of flowers, rather than embarking on large scale panoramic views. It was his northern origin that gave Nolde the ability to capture this powerful atmosphere and allowed him to find an understanding of those challenging conditions in nature and life. As Peter Vergo pointed out, flowers symbolized for Nolde the eternal cycle of birth, life and death (Peter Vergo, "Flowers and Gardens," Emil Nolde (exhibition catalogue), Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1996, p. 118).

The artist's engagement with this particular subject matter also demonstrates Nolde's interest in the work of Vincent van Gogh, particularly in one of his most iconic subject matters—the sunflowers (see fig. 1). During the 1920s and early 1930s Nolde visited several exhibitions of the Dutch artist's work; which included among others, the major van Gogh retrospective at the Galerie Paul Cassirer in Berlin in 1928. The fervent dedication to expression and symbolic use of color exhibited in van Gogh's works matched Nolde's own deeply held ideology. The artist wrote: "I loved the music of colours... Yellow can depict happiness and also pain. Red can mean fire, blood or roses; blue can mean silver, the sky or a storm, each colour has a soul of its own" (quoted in Martin Urban, Emil Nolde Landscapes, New York, 1969, p. 16). The culmination of these theories can be found in his flower paintings and watercolors such as the present work: "The glowing colors of the flowers and the purity of the colors—I loved it all. I loved the flowers in their destiny: shooting up, blossoming, bending, fading, thrown into a ditch. A human destiny is not always so fine" (Emil Nolde, Jahre der Kämpfe, Cologne, 1967, p. 100). As a keen observer of his surroundings and deeply immersed in nature, Nolde was one of the few painters of his time to translate flowers into a powerful painterly expression in such a persuasive and compelling way.