Woman with a hat

Details

With a photo expertise by Professor Dr Manfred Reuther, Klockries, dated 18 May 2023. The work is registered and documented in the archive of Professor Manfred Reuther under the number Nolde A-276/2023.

Literature:

Sabarsky, Serge, Zeichnungen und Aquarelle des deutschen Expressionismus, Stuttgart 1990, with col. Illus.

Exhibition:

Emil Nolde: Watercolours from the years 1894-1956, Frankfurter Kunstverein, 1967, cat. no. 43;

Emil Nolde works from American Collections, Palmer Museum of Art/Pennsylvania State University, University Park 1988, cat. no. 28, pp. 15, 31, with col. illus. p. 31;

Drawings and watercolours of German Expressionism, Städtische Galerie Bietigheim-Bissingen and others, 1990/91;

Emil Nolde: Watercolours and Graphics, Mezinárodní kulturní centrum Egona Schieleho, Krumlov, 1994-96, pp. 44/45;

Emil Nolde: Watercolours and Prints, Städtische Galerie Jesuitenkirche, Aschaffenburg a.o., 1998, pp. 30/31, with col. illus.

Emil Nolde. Weltsicht, Farbe, Phantasie, Stadthalle, Balingen 2008, with col. illus. p. 113.

Provenance:

Galleria Henze, Campione d’Italia, May 1987;

Collection Serge Sabarsky (1912-1996), New York, acquired from the aforementioned;

Estate of Serge Sabarsky, New York, since 1996;

Vally Sabarsky Collection (1902-2002), New York;

Vally Sabarsky Foundation, New York, since 2002.

Descrizione

– Nolde repeats the motif of a lady with a hat from his 1911 oil painting “Tea Table” (Urban 410)

– The watercolour is also closely related to the painting “Frauenprofil” from 1911, which was confiscated in 1937 and has since been lost (Urban 433)

– Large-format depiction, captured spontaneously with a few watercolours

From the end of 1904, Nolde and his wife Ada spent most of their winters in Berlin, where they rented a studio at Tauentzienstraße 8 for many years.

He created numerous works with motifs from Berlin’s café and nightlife.

Nolde writes about his life in Berlin: “Every evening at eleven, I put on my dark trousers and the black St. Gallen tailcoat (…). My Ada also put on her best dress and we went to masked balls, cabarets and the ice palace. And then we went to public pubs, where pale as powder and smelling of corpses sat impotent asphalt lions and hectic demimondaine ladies in their elegant, daring gowns, worn as if by queens. And on we went into the cigarette haze of the morning cafés, where newcomers from the provinces sat harmlessly with streetwalkers, half asleep in a champagne frenzy.

I drew and drew, the light of the halls, the surface glitter, all the people, whether bad or right, whether half-worldly or completely depraved, I drew this downside of life with its make-up, with its slippery dirt and corruption. There was a lot of eye candy everywhere. These people were not important to me, they came, danced, sat there and left again, what I managed to achieve on my paper only seemed essential to me. Sometimes it was humid in this depth between all the carelessly happy and unhappy people. I drew and drew.” (Emil Nolde, Jahre der Kämpfe. 1902-1914, Cologne 1967, p. 147 f.).

Our large-format work, spontaneously captured with a few watercolours, shows a petite portrait of a woman in a striking profile facing left with a grandiose feathered hat on her small, almost fragile head. The narrow, pale face with a pointed, yellow nose, an equally pointed chin and a narrow-lipped, slightly open mouth, reddish in colour like an incision, is outlined by a yellow contour line. From the largely empty, somewhat pale half of the face, a single, small, blue eye round looks somewhat lost above the cheek, but wide awake. The large, wide-brimmed feathered hat in dark blue defines his claim in the pictorial structure.

In the collection of the Nolde Foundation Seebüll there is a comparable, closely related watercolour from Nolde’s estate (Seebüll, inv. no.: A.PoF.47) with the portrait of a

Woman, but in sharp profile to the right. She is also wearing a lavish feathered hat with the same pointed brim at the front.