Emil NoldeLegend, Vision, Ecstasy
8 Dezember 2000 - 18 February 2001

Emil Nolde. This new exhibition consists of around 70 works with religious themes, painted by Nolde between 1909 and the mid-1920s. The artist's religious paintings demonstrate a great intensity and expressiveness; they include some of his strongest figurative paint-ings, and reveal his quest for deeper spiritual understanding. The religious paintings marked the beginning of a new artistic phase for Nolde, not only in terms of content. Through these works he also discovered new possibilities of stylistic expression which gained him independence from Impressionism. He focussed on the portrayal of inner visions instead of the reproduction of sensory impressions, preferred extremes of spirituality to the depiction of everyday subjects and replaced fluidity of form with an expressively heightened, autonomous colourfulness.
The exhibition also includes paintings which feature rapturous depictions of dance, illustrating the fact that Nolde was not interested in religion in a conventional sense, but rather in exploring borderline ecstatic experiences and elementary forms of sen-suality. This exhibititon in the Hamburg Kunsthalle is related to one shown in St. Catherine's church in Lübeck in 1921, organized by Carl Georg Heise with the support of Gustav Pauli, then Director of the Hamburg Kunsthalle. This was the first time all of Nolde's three-part work »Maria Aegyptiaca« for the museum collection.