Making Colour Sing/Scream

Duncan Macmillan is transported by the highly charged works of the pioneering German Expressionist

EMIL NOLDE (1867–1956) was one of a group of artists in Germany ambitious to find a more openly emotional way of painting in the early years of the past century. Later called the German expressionists, they took inspiration from van Gogh for the freedom of their brushwork, from Gauguin for the inspiration of the primitive and, from both, a belief in the power of colour liberated from description.

They also identified with the emotional intensity of earlier German artists such as dürer and Grünewald. They saw their highly charged work as distinctScottish National Gallery of Modern Art ively German, in contrast to the calm of italian Renaissance painting, and felt this legitimised their own ambition to throw off all restraint. Nolde’s painting Milkmaids 1, from 1903, already shows this lack of restraint, but also how much it owed to van Gogh. Three milkmaids are blown by the wind, which is portrayed by the driving rhythm of the artist’s brush.

Born in the flat farmlands of Friesland, on the border between Germany and denmark, Nolde was a countryman. Before the First World War, he generally spent the summer in the country and wintered in Berlin, where he encountered artists such as Franz Marc, Karl SchmidtRottluff and Paul Klee and was, for a short while, a member of their group Die Brücke (The Bridge).