Emil Nolde, great artist and violently anti-semitic

Photo: Getty Images

The German expressionist painter Emil Nolde, considered one of the greatest artists of his time, was a pride of German art lovers. A controversy over the virulence of his anti-Semitism casts a shadow over the artist, an article from the newspaper Le Temps, from Switzerland.

Angela Merkel did not wait for the controversy. At the beginning of April, the Chancellor made it known that she did not want in her office two paintings of Emil Nolde which decorated the place. Nor will it replace them with two paintings by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff instead of the Prussian Cultural Property Foundation, which manages Berlin's museums and lends works from its funds to the Bundestag or the Chancellery.

Angela Merkel has always loved the work of Nolde. But an exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof highlighting the virulent anti-Semitism of this expressionist painter has made the company of his paintings unbearable for the Chancellor. Even if Brecher ("breaking") and Flower garden are not strictly speaking political works.

As for the expressionist Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, his biography is not without stains, as shown by a second exhibition devoted to German Expressionists during National Socialism at the Brücke Museum in Berlin.

The controversy aroused by both Nolde's anti-Semitism, whose virulence has long been downplayed, and the Chancellor's decision to part from his paintings speaks a lot about the shadow that Nazism continues to shed on German contemporary art.

At the death of the painter, in 1956, the foundation of Seebüll maintains the image of an artist persecuted by Nazism, forbidden to work, deprived of paper and brushes and forced to brush a few watercolors of flowers in hiding, excluded from the art market and stripped of his livelihood. That Nolde admired Hitler, that he entered the NSDAP Nazi Party in 1934, that he hoped to see his popularity take off under the Third Reich were well known. But not the extent of his anti-Semitism.

The arrival at the head of the Seebüll Foundation of a new director, Christian Ring, in 2013 will change things. It opens to historians the painter's archives, and the 25,000 to 30,000 documents they contain.

"Nolde saw himself as the most important pioneer of the anti-Jewish struggle in the art world," says Bernhard Fulda. He liked to present himself as a victim of Jewish artists before 1933 and as a victim of the Nazis after 1945. Antisemitism played a central role in him. To the point of wanting to propose solutions to the "Jewish problem" that he wanted to submit to Hitler, to free Germany from its Jews. Or to denounce to Goebbels his colleague Max Pechstein, supposedly Jewish because of his name. When Pechstein, anxious for his safety, asked him for explanations, Nolde simply replied that his existential questions did not interest him.

"Merkel’s decision that no painting of a painter who supported the National Socialist ideology can decorate the office of the head of the German government is in my opinion a good thing," said the Deputy Speaker of the Bundestag, Thomas Oppermann (SPD). But Thole Rotermund, Treasurer of the German Federation of Art Galleries, sees it as a form of hypocrisy, noting that "Mrs Merkel continues to sit at the forefront" at the Bayreuth Festival devoted every year to the music of the very antisemite Richard Wagner.

"Emil Nolde - A German legend. The artist and the Nazi regime ", Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. Until September 15th.

The post above reproduces parts of an  article from the Swiss 

newspaper Le Temps.