Emil Nolde: The Sea

About this book

Expressionist painter Emil Nolde (1867-1956) was a trailblazing virtuoso of watercolor painting. Applying paint to paper with incomparable intensity he created richly luminous paintings of brooding romantic landscapes and alienating modern city scenes. The sea occupies a singularly important place in his oeuvre; Nolde began painting sea watercolors around 1920. Already in 1921 the art historian Max Sauerlandt observed that Nolde saw the sea "not from a beach or a boat but as it exists in itself devoid of any reference to man eternally in motion ever changing living out its life in and for itself: a divine self-consuming primal force that in its untrammeled freedom has existed unchanged since the very first day of creation." Emile Nolde: The Sea gathers together nearly 30 of these beautiful watercolor paintings many of them previously unpublished in a charming gift-book format.