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Lot Essay
Nolde's flower paintings often use their subject matter as a vehicle by which to express a mood or emotion. His inspiration for such 'humanizing' of nature came from the example set by Vincent Van Gogh. Nolde maintained an interest in Van Gogh's work throughout his life and his preoccupation with sunflowers undoubtedly reflects this influence. As they had been for Van Gogh, for Nolde, a large part of the beauty of flowers lay in the simple elegance of their life cycle. "The blossoming colours of the flowers and the purity of those colours - I love them," he wrote, "I loved the flowers and their destiny: shooting up, blooming, radiating, glowing, gladdening, drooping, wilting, and ultimately thrown away and dying. Our human destinies are by no means always so logical or so beautiful." (E. Nolde. Jahre de Kämpfe, Berlin, Rembrandt Verlag, 1934, p.228.)
Concentrating solely on the vibrant yellow heads of the sunflowers shining like burning suns against a dense dark green foliage, Sonnenblumen I is a work that celebrates the peak of the sunflower's life cycle. Possibly the first of an important series of five paintings of sunflowers that Nolde painted in the late summer and early autumn of 1928, Sonnenblumen I clearly reflects the joy that Nolde gained from the first blooming of his newly-built flower garden in the grounds of his new house in Seebüll. Nolde had moved to Seebüll from his house at Utenwarf the previous year and there in the new surroundings had set about building his own house, studio and flower-garden with the help of his wife, Ada. As it had been at Utenwarf, the flower garden was to be a dominant feature of the Noldes' lives in Seebüll, but it had proved hard work to build from scratch on the windswept coastal fields of North Schleswig. By the autumn of 1928 however, their efforts had finally come to fruition and Nolde wrote to his friend Hans Fehr that "our young garden with its swelling abundance of flowers (is) lovelier than we ever had. The sunflowers are so tall that I stand beneath them with my head thrown back, gratefully admiring their beauty. There has been a succession of lovely days; barely imaginable colours are glowing, and the scent of the mignonettes carries as far as the house." (Letter 20th September 1928.)
The series of sunflower paintings that Nolde painted at this time reflect the artist's satisfaction with his new garden - each of the five paintings being a celebration of the sunny uplifting nature of the sunflower as well as of its hardiness and its strength. With its universal use of heavy impasto and its dramatic contrast of light and dark, Sonnenblumen I magnificently captures both the vitality and the radiance of the sunflower in such a way that the execution of the painting seems to echo the struggle for growth and the hardiness of the land in which Nolde had chosen to live. For Nolde, the soil and landscape of his homeland in North Shleswig had proven themselves to be a precondition of his ability to create and it was for this reason above all that Nolde ultimately chose to live in this remote Northern region of Germany. He believed that "the primal depths" of his artistic identity were "rooted far down and close to home". "For my part," he wrote to Ernst Gosebruch the director of the Essen Museum in 1922, "I consider that, in spite of my travels in all directions, my art is rooted to my native soil, here in the narrow land between the two seas". In many ways the sunflower paintings Nolde produce in the autumn of 1928 are a visual metaphor of this self-realisation.
Concentrating solely on the vibrant yellow heads of the sunflowers shining like burning suns against a dense dark green foliage, Sonnenblumen I is a work that celebrates the peak of the sunflower's life cycle. Possibly the first of an important series of five paintings of sunflowers that Nolde painted in the late summer and early autumn of 1928, Sonnenblumen I clearly reflects the joy that Nolde gained from the first blooming of his newly-built flower garden in the grounds of his new house in Seebüll. Nolde had moved to Seebüll from his house at Utenwarf the previous year and there in the new surroundings had set about building his own house, studio and flower-garden with the help of his wife, Ada. As it had been at Utenwarf, the flower garden was to be a dominant feature of the Noldes' lives in Seebüll, but it had proved hard work to build from scratch on the windswept coastal fields of North Schleswig. By the autumn of 1928 however, their efforts had finally come to fruition and Nolde wrote to his friend Hans Fehr that "our young garden with its swelling abundance of flowers (is) lovelier than we ever had. The sunflowers are so tall that I stand beneath them with my head thrown back, gratefully admiring their beauty. There has been a succession of lovely days; barely imaginable colours are glowing, and the scent of the mignonettes carries as far as the house." (Letter 20th September 1928.)
The series of sunflower paintings that Nolde painted at this time reflect the artist's satisfaction with his new garden - each of the five paintings being a celebration of the sunny uplifting nature of the sunflower as well as of its hardiness and its strength. With its universal use of heavy impasto and its dramatic contrast of light and dark, Sonnenblumen I magnificently captures both the vitality and the radiance of the sunflower in such a way that the execution of the painting seems to echo the struggle for growth and the hardiness of the land in which Nolde had chosen to live. For Nolde, the soil and landscape of his homeland in North Shleswig had proven themselves to be a precondition of his ability to create and it was for this reason above all that Nolde ultimately chose to live in this remote Northern region of Germany. He believed that "the primal depths" of his artistic identity were "rooted far down and close to home". "For my part," he wrote to Ernst Gosebruch the director of the Essen Museum in 1922, "I consider that, in spite of my travels in all directions, my art is rooted to my native soil, here in the narrow land between the two seas". In many ways the sunflower paintings Nolde produce in the autumn of 1928 are a visual metaphor of this self-realisation.