ABSTRACT
EMIL NOLDE, the original German Expressionist, had a wild way with paint. Where an academic painter would have begun cautiously with a smooth thin underpainting, Nolde started right off with opaque paint at full strength. Instead of planning where each color would go, he worked impulsively, changing his mind in midstream, piling color on color in thick impastos, or scraping the brush back and forth on the dry canvas long after it had given up its pigment. If the paint became too thick and wet and yet was still all wrong, he did not swab off the excess with a cloth, or put the canvas aside to let it dry. Usually he just kept painting, until the thin paste became an unmanageable oily sea. Some of his pictures look like cracked molds for bas-reliefs, and others are haggard where the dry brush has scratched and rubbed to get the last morsel of pigment. Even though he knew the academic protocols, Nolde didn’t care about fat and thin paint, or the slow patient building-up from dark toward light, or even the proven logic of color combinations. He covered greens with oranges, and violets with yellows, and he tried over and over to do something every beginning painter knows is hopeless-he shoveled brushloads of white into wet blues and blacks, hoping to lighten them. (Blues can’t be lightened that way: the white disappears endlessly into the dark.)
Nolde’s process was unruly, but the results are sometimes wonderful beyond anything the later Expressionists managed. Deep orange suns, embedded in thick magenta clouds, shine darkly on brackish waters. Cool forests, shot through with bluish green treetrunks, shimmer with streaks of dirty yellow and heavy brown. Shining sunflowers hang their plastered faces in gardens filled with dense Viridian and purple, shadowed under bluish skies. Spooks and specters-Nolde believed naturally and
impassively in ghosts of all kinds-fluoresce in red and blue against predawn mountain skies. In Nolde’s pictures, paint is macerated rock, dried onto the surfaces of things. It is a residue, a stain, or a smear on the raw canvas. Paint is paint, much more solidly and truly than in the “self-referential” gestures of postmodern painting. It has a ponderous luminescence that the filmy glazes of academic painters never achieved, as if the entire world were encrusted in gleaming volcanic rock.
