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©
Nolde Stiftung Seebüll
Emil Nolde

Glowing Sunflowers

1936
Oil on canvas.
88.5 x 67.3 cm
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Inv. no.
692
(
1973.67
)
Room 38
Level 1
Permanent Collection
30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 Postpop rooms Rodin room
30 18th and 19th Centuries. Transatlantic Relations 31 19th Century. American Landscape and Environmental Awareness 32 19th Century. American Landscape and Urban Life 33 Recovering the ligth. Restoration of Waterloo Bridge, by André Derain 34 20th Century. Expressionist Landscapes 35 20th Century. Expressionist Portraits 36 20th Century. The Language of the Body 37 20th Century. Urban unrest 38 20th Century. Flowers 39 20th Century. Pioneers of abstraction 40 20th Century. Popular flavor 41 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition I 42 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition II 43 20th Century. Abstract Utopias 44 20th Century. Dada and Surrealism 45 20th Century. Interwar Realisms 46 20th Century. American Abstraction I 48 20th Century. Post-ward American Art 49 20th Century. Post-ward European Figurative Art 50 20th Century. Informalisms 51 20th Century. Homo Ludens 52 20th Century. Pop Art 53 Postpop rooms: Ayako Rokakku 54 Postpop rooms: Ayako Rokakku 55 Postpop rooms: Ayako Rokakku 56 Postpop rooms: Ayako Rokakku Rodin Exhibition room

In addition to a great landscape artist, Emil Nolde was an important flower painter. His pictures of sunflowers, on which he concentrated for over a decade, link him directly to Van Gogh, an artist whom Nolde admired throughout his lifetime. Nolde began to paint a long series on sunflowers at Utenwarf in 1926, shortly before moving to Seebüll. As Peter Selz has pointed out, at his houses in both locations Nolde cultivated leafy gardens that he used as models for his oil and watercolour paintings during the last thirty years of his life. The flowerbeds — planted with sunflowers, roses, poppies and camellias — formed the initials “A” and “E” or Ada and Emil in an odd combination of petit bourgeois taste and thirst for originality.

According to the artist’s handwritten list, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza Glowing Sunflowers was painted in 1936, a year in which Nolde’s career was beginning to run into difficulties: following the consolidation of the National Socialist regime, his works were starting to be withdrawn from German museums, and many would be included in the exhibitions devoted to what was considered degenerate art.

In the present painting Nolde provides a frontal view of half a dozen or so sunflowers with exuberant colouring, concentrating on their petals, pistils and leaves and omitting any reference to the soil or flowerbed in which they grow. Their slightly bowed heads suggest that they will soon lose their strength and become doubled over from the weight of the seeds until they are no longer able to support them. Nolde seeks to convey his own emotions by depicting flowers like these: “I adore flowers and their destiny, they grow rapidly, bud, bloom, glow, show their joy, sag, wither and die.”

The first owner of the work, the banker Friedrich Doehlemann, who possessed several of Nolde’s works, kept up a certain amount of correspondence with the artist. In addition to director of the Bayerische Gemeindebank, Doehlemann was president of the committee that helped finance the construction of the Haus der Kunst in Munich, the venue for the 1937 Entartete Kunst exhibition, which Nolde visited with Doehlemann himself during a trip to Munich that year.

Paloma Alarcó

20th Century20th Century - European painting. ExpressionismPaintingOilcanvas
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Glowing Sunflowers, 1936, Emil Nolde (Emil Hansen)
Glowing Sunflowers
Emil Nolde

©

Nolde Stiftung Seebüll

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Glowing Sunflowers, 1936, Emil Nolde (Emil Hansen)
Glowing Sunflowers
Emil Nolde

©

Nolde Stiftung Seebüll

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