Politically naïve, Nolde had initially expected to play a major artistic part in the German National Revolution, proclaimed by Hitler and his supporters in 1933. Indeed, in that same year, as a Danish citizen, he had joined the Danish section of the National Socialist Party, believing it was his duty to assist in any way possible. He was therefore greatly disillusioned when on 13th May 1933 the President of the Prussian Academy of Arts called on all members to tender their 'voluntary' resignation. By 1938 Käthe Kollwitz, Max Liebermann, Otto Dix, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Ernst Barlach, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Mies van der Rohe, Rudolf Belling, Max Pechstein, Karl Hofer and Oskar Kokoschka had all resigned. Nolde was the only artist still refusing to comply.

Hitler's ideology prevailed against all forms of Modernism, and he singled out Nolde in particular as a "degenerate artist" and "cultural bolshevik". A large number of his works, seized from museums, were displayed in the Entartete Kunst ("Degenerate Art") exhibition mockingly mounted in Munich in 1937 by the Socialist art officials. Unlike so many of his contemporaries, such as Feininger, Grosz, Kandinsky, Klee and Kokoschka, Nolde could not bring himself to leave the country he loved so much - despite that, as a Danish subject, he could not have been prevented from leaving, had he wished to do so. In 1937, and for the next four years, Nolde petitioned the propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels, for the return of his confiscated works. Other than a brief respite in 1939 when four works were returned to him, he had no success. In the summer of 1941 he received a letter from Ziegler, the President of the Board of National Culture (Reichkunstkammer), telling him that, "In view of the Führer's decree concerning the elimination of degenerate art from the museums, one thousand and fifty-two of your works have been confiscated...For your lack of reliability you are expelled from the Reichkunstkammer and are as of this moment forbidden from undertaking any professional or ancillary activity with the field of the visual arts." Thus he had been forbidden to paint.

There exist hundreds of small watercolours that date from the years between this decree and the end of the Socialist persecution brought about the the end of the War in 1945. These works, which Nolde called his Ungemalte Bilder, his "unpainted pictures", were his only means of expression; easy to conceal, they were executed in a small room in his house in Seebüll. He did not dare paint in oils, for fear of the smell giving him away. These works are much denser in their composition than his earlier, larger watercolours, but are given coherence by their spontaneity: "The painting emerged from dream and subconscious and achieved presence and definition only in the act of painting. Each was a poetic interpretation of the painter's mood. The fruit of active meditation, it retained its intense meditative impress." (W. Haftmann, Emil Nolde, Marlborough Fine Art, London, 1964, p. 11)

Between 1945 and 1951 Nolde produced over one hundred oil paintings, nearly all of which can be traced back to themes and compositions of these small watercolours. "If I am to paint them all, my lifespan will have to be more than doubled." It is on one of these Ungemalte Bilder (Nolde-Stiftung Collection, Ung. 526) that the present picture, Lichtzauber, is based.


Lichtzauber was painted in 1947, the year after Nolde's invalid wife Ada died of a heart attack, and the year before he married Jolanthe Erdmann, the twenty-six year old daughter of his pianist friend, Eduard.

In these post-war works, and their watercolour studies, Nolde's colours are more subdued, as he shunned the contrasts of colour that had appealed so greatly to him beforehand. In addition to this change of tonal representation, Nolde also gave these works a diffuse, serene light - he considered this to be such an important element of the present picture that he used it as the inspiration for the title.

Written in notebooks during the time Nolde was working on the Ungamalte Bilder are notes that he called Wörter am Rande (Words in the Margin). The following is one such note, demonstrating his ideas about colour and its effect on human emotions: "Yellow paint can show happiness, and it can show pain. There is fiery red, blood red and rose red. There is silver blue, sky blue and thunder blue. every colour holds within it a soul, which makes me happy or repels me, and which acts as a stimulus. To a person who has no art in him, colours are colours, tones tones, words words, and that is all. All their consequences for the human spirit, which range from heaven and hell, just go unnoticed." (30 Dec. 1942)

Although landscapes are represented in some of the paintings relating to Ungemalte Bilder, the majority of them deal with the human condition. The topics that Nolde examines are varied: from optimistic depictions of young dancing figures that are full of life, to the depressing burdens of old age, leading to death. As subjects, Nolde often combines couples such as man and woman, brother and sister, age and youth, joy and sorrow, god and devil, which are then placed in timeless voids that emphasise their alienation. "...Nolde had learned much about human relationships, and in this great cycle he gave a passionate visual form to his wisdom. There are figures that appeal, reject, wail, smile and contemplate. There are lonely people, jealous people..." (P. Selz, The Unpainted Pictures in Emil Nolde, exh. cat., New York, 1963, p. 71).

This is particularly noticeable in Lichtzauber where Nolde depicts two lonely individuals who desire contact with each other or with the viewer, but who are totally incapable of all communication, internal and external. He has placed them both in their own powerful void, from which there is no respite. There is only tension and alienation.