Sibirier

Like many artists working in early-twentieth century, including Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, Emil Nolde found inspiration in non-western art traditions and cultures and believed their art forms encapsulated a more authentic means of expression. Nolde saw this art, with its “mystic power,” as an “affirmation” of his own anti-classical aesthetic (P. Selz, Emil Nolde, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1963, p. 34). He amassed a collection of figurines and, from around 1911, frequently visited Berlin’s Ethnologisches Museum to sketch its displays. “My interest in all that was foreign, primeval and primally ethnic was exceptionally strong,” Nolde later explained. “I had to get to know the unknown” (quoted in Emil Nolde Retrospective, exh. cat., Städel Museum, Frankfurt, 2014, p. 39). As such, he was thrilled to be asked by the German Colonial Ministry to travel to northeast New Guinea, then a German colony, to work as a pictorial reporter for the Külz-Leber Expedition. Nolde and his wife Ada left Berlin in the autumn of 1913 and travelled through Russia, Manchuria, Korea, Japan, China, Manila, and the Palau Islands before arriving in Rabaul in mid-December.
Nolde made sketches at every stage of his journey, and in Siberia, he often drew the various people milling around the waiting rooms of train stations. “I drew and drew with my pen, when we started off, when we stopped, when the train was leaving, when the figures outside were standing around gazing blankly, or trudging sluggishly past,” he explained. “Sitting in the gloom, feeling the strokes of the pen more than seeing them. And always having to watch out that the train did not depart and leave me sitting in the middle of Siberia drawing and drawing” (quoted in M. Reuther, Emil Nolde: Eye Contact, Early Portraits, exh. cat., Ulmer Museum, Ulm, 2005, pp. 149–150).
These resulted in a series of paintings he worked on after returning home, the trip having been cut short by the outbreak of the First World War. Painted in 1914, Sibirier, features a single face almost entirely filling the frame as if Nolde were face-to-face with his subject. The man wears an ushanka, or Russian fur hat with earflaps, and behind him, the slate-grey sky and white ground emphasize the wintery atmosphere. Nolde was a colorist par excellence, and the palette of Sibirier is rich and daring, the paint thickly applied. Unlike several of his fellow artists, Nolde’s visual idiom remained remarkably consistent no matter the subject he was studying. He never applied the formal aspects of indigenous art to his paintings. Although elated by his travels, Nolde, unlike Paul Gauguin, for example, had no desire to leave Europe. Instead, he was driven to observe and document the people and customs he encountered and give image to their lives.