EDINBURGH.- This summer sees a major presentation of stunning and vibrant works by pioneering German Expressionist artist Emil Nolde (1867-1956) at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh.

This is the most ambitious exhibition of Nolde’s work in the UK in more than two decades and only the second ever exhibition to be held in Scotland, with over 120 paintings, drawings, watercolours and prints generously loaned by Nolde Stiftung Seebüll. This full-scale retrospective charts the career of one of Germany’s most accomplished modern artists from 1901 up until 1950, just a few years before his death. Many of the works have rarely been seen outside Germany.

Nolde was one of the first Expressionists and is recognised as one of the pivotal figures of the European avant-garde, renowned for his bold use of colour. Emil Nolde: Colour is Life encompasses a rich and diverse range of work from the artist’s early atmospheric landscapes to the intensely coloured rich oils of his later career; from images of soldiers, which capture the build-up to the First World War to a series of extraordinary religious paintings, with their heady mix of spirituality and eroticism. Other works on show demonstrate Nolde’s passion for the immense skies, flat, windswept landscapes and storm-tossed seas of his north German homeland, as well as his fascination for the demi-monde of Berlin’s cafés and cabarets, the busy to-and-fro of tugboats in the port of Hamburg and the many people and places he saw on a trip to the South Seas in 1914.

In the early twentieth century, artists of the Expressionist movement placed a greater significance on conveying feelings or ideas than on replicating reality. Though he was briefly affiliated with one of the two main German Expressionist groups, Die Brücke (the Bridge), Nolde worked independently and alone for most of his life, and developed his own expressionist style around 1909-10. Nolde felt strongly about what he painted, identifying with his subjects in every brushstroke, heightening his colours and simplifying his shapes, so that the viewer can also experience his emotional response to the world about him.

Born in the village of Nolde in 1867, Hans Emil Hansen adopted the name of his birthplace as his surname, upon getting married in 1902. His father was a farmer and Nolde often worked the land after school and may have followed in his father’s footsteps had he not trained as a woodcarver, and subsequently as an artist.

From 1904 onwards Nolde usually spent the winter in Berlin and the summer at his home near the German-Danish border. His wife, Ada, was a dancer and it was natural that the artist got to know the world in which she worked: the cabarets, cafés and theatres of the bustling capital. In the winter of 1910-11, Nolde drew and painted a large number of works, depicting the frenetic life of these places, not only the entertainers but the audiences as well.

Nolde wanted to concentrate on the impact that the colourful and lively scenes had on him. This resulted in paintings and watercolours of high-keyed colour, and drawings of dancers in which movement and energy were of paramount importance. The works he produced during this brief period are among the most enthralling and beautiful of his entire career.

In February 1910, while exhibiting his work in Hamburg, Nolde became engrossed with the bustle and movement of the city’s port, the largest and most important in Germany. Captivated, he made a series of paintings, ink and wash drawings and prints in a burst of creative energy. Paintings such as Smoking Steamboats, (1910) capture the maelstrom of natural and man-made forces that make up the port: the wind whips up the water’s surface, clouds and the tug-boat’s smoke and steam into a barely decipherable whole, as Nolde applies thick paint in frenzied strokes of blue, green, yellow and red in response to the scene before him.

Nolde moved to his home in Seebüll in 1926. There he cultivated an extensive garden where he created many of his best-known and best-loved flower and garden, oil paintings. These sensuous paintings attract us in much the same way that flowers do; in creating them Nolde gave full rein to his love of colour, which became the main subject of works like Large Poppies (Red, Red, Red), (1942). One of the finest of all his flower paintings, this was made during the middle of the Second World War, when, having been named a ‘degenerate artist’ by the Nazi regime, he was forbidden to buy paints and canvas. As travelling was also difficult in wartime, his garden would become a great source of inspiration, resulting in some of his finest works.

It is ironic that Nolde should be persecuted in this way by the Nazis. He had joined the Party and had hoped that the government would place artists such as himself at the centre of their cultural policy. Instead, over 1000 of his works were confiscated by the regime and 33 of them (more than any other artist) were included in the infamous Degenerate Art Exhibition in Munich in 1937, intended as a showcase for what the Nazis saw as the worst excesses of modern art.

Nolde could not openly practice as a professional artist, showing and selling his work. Instead he created some of the finest works of his career – his so-called ‘unpainted pictures’ – watercolours rich in colour and filled with fantastical figures. His complex history as an artist living through turbulent times, supporting the Party but rejected by the regime, makes Nolde’s career as problematic and conflicted as it is celebrated.