NARRATOR:
The figures in this open sail boat are extremely vulnerable. There’s no sign of land, just the churning sea and a narrow strip of dark, stormy sky. The boat’s thin mast looks as though it could snap at any moment from the enormous force of the wind on the billowing sail. We have no clues to explain who these travelers are or why they have undertaken such a perilous journey.
Emil Nolde intentionally left their story ambiguous. Instead, he painted this work to express intense, personal emotions. Nolde was part of a group of early 20th-century German Expressionist painters called “die Brücke,” or The Bridge, whose members rejected traditional academic style and subject matter. Here, Nolde used broad strokes of thick pigment, contrasted with nearly bare areas of the canvas, to convey the movement of the water and the foreboding sky. It appears that he painted in the cresting waves before the bluish green paint he used for the sea was completely dry. In the foreground and upper right especially, the thick white paint pulls up some of the green, reinforcing the feeling of a churning sea. Nolde’s family had lived for nine generations on the same land next to the North Sea, so he knew firsthand both its beauty and destructive power.
The Sea I
1912
Emil Nolde (German, 1867-1956)
On View
In the early 1910s Nolde painted a series of seascapes, pictures, as he described them, of “wildly heaving green waves,” inspired by a childhood on Germany’s North Sea coast and by one particularly violent crossing he had made as an adult. Among the exponents of German Expressionism—a term he found inadequate to the messianic mission of his art—Nolde was perhaps the most virtuosic painter. Here, for example, he conjured the foaming crests of waves with thick strokes of white paint, applied wet-into-wet, but rendered the fragile, billowing sailcloth with a transparent brown layer through which the texture of the canvas is plainly visible.
Details
- Artist Name: Emil Nolde (German, 1867-1956)
- Title: The Sea I
- Date: 1912
- Medium: Oil on canvas
- Dimensions: 29 x 35 in. (73.7 x 88.9 cm)
- Credit Line: Norton Simon Art Foundation
- Accession Number: M.2000.1.2.P
- Copyright: © Nolde Stiftung Seebüll
Object Information
The artist, given for safe-keeping, 1941-45, to;
Margrit and Bernhard Sprengel, Hanover, returned to;
The artist, by descent to his nephew;
Emil Bonnichsen, Bylderup-Bov (Stemmilt), Denmark;
[Roman Norbert Ketterer, Lago di Lugano, Switzerland, sold 1969 to];
The Norton Simon Foundation (F.1969.16.3.P); sold 2000 to;
Norton Simon Art Foundation.
Margrit and Bernhard Sprengel, Hanover, returned to;
The artist, by descent to his nephew;
Emil Bonnichsen, Bylderup-Bov (Stemmilt), Denmark;
[Roman Norbert Ketterer, Lago di Lugano, Switzerland, sold 1969 to];
The Norton Simon Foundation (F.1969.16.3.P); sold 2000 to;
Norton Simon Art Foundation.
Emil Nolde
- Halle, Kunstverein, 1814-01 to 1914-02
- Urban, Martin, Emil Nolde: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings,no. 527 pp. 41, 461
- Emil Nolde und die Sammlung Sprengel 1937 bis 1956: Geschichte einer Freundschaft, pp. 18, 80, 262
- Masterpieces from the Norton Simon Museum,1989, p. 184
- Understanding Paintings: Themes in Art Explored and Explained, p. 179
- Sherman, Marilyn, et al, Reading Literature, Purple Level, Grade 12, p. 131
- Campbell, Sara, Collector Without Walls: Norton Simon and His Hunt for the Best,2010, cat. 651 p. 323
- Ketterer, Roman Norbert, Moderne Kunst VI,no. 86 pp. 146-147
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