During the Third Reich Nolde was officially prohibited to paint, draw or produce art of any kind but he nevertheless continued to do so. In the Marlborough exhibition catalogue Martin Urban writes about the series of pictures that he executed during this period: "Nolde called them his ungemalte Bilder, his 'unpainted pictures'; they have become known in the English-speaking world simply as his 'forbidden paintings'. They consist of many hundreds of little watercolours, painted in a remote corner of his house in Seebull; only a few of his friends knew of their existence. Nolde painted them on scraps of papier japonais; after his expulsion from the Central Office of Fine Arts, he was not even allowed to buy materials. There were Gestapo checks as well; he did not dare paint in oil, as the smell might have given him away. The small watercolours he had been painting since 1938 were easy to conceal, and between 1941 and 1945 they became virtually his only means of expression ... The pictures were produced without prior deliberation, springing from the painter's contact with his colours while in a state of meditation; the objects emerge from the forms and from the harmonies of colours. 'It is quite wonderful', wrote Nolde, 'when figures are born into the image, often so suddenly that the painter himself is hardly aware of what goes on'." (op. cit., p.7)
Urban also writes, "It was granted to Nolde to create, in these years of darkness, in defiance of prohibitions and threats, and in contempt for his persecutors, a sequence of pictures which constitutes a summation of all his work." (bid.)