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Lot Essay
Heuwiese (Hay Meadow) is one of a series of dramatic and richly coloured landscapes that Nolde made repeatedly of the Danish borderlands and of Northern Schleswig where he grew up and spent most of his life. Nolde's landscapes are often more than mere literal depictions of his surroundings, because, feeling an innate bond with the landscape of his homeland, Nolde sought through his art to commune with and express the elemental forces he felt and experienced at work in nature. To this end Nolde chose to work directly from the natural environment, often venturing out into the fields in all weathers in order to experience at first hand the natural forces of his immediate surroundings, to feel them, and thereby be able to intuitively transmit their energy and vibration onto canvas.
Though maintaining a certain degree of faithfulness to outward appearance, Nolde's early landscapes, like those of van Gogh whose art played a defining role in this period, are invocations of the artist's own emotions and intuitive response to the landscape. They are an attempt at transmitting, not just the visual sensation of the scene before him but also the physical and emotional effect this environment instills in man. Landschaft (Landscape) is a powerful example of this tendency of Nolde's art to convey a heightened experience of nature through the medium of his immediate surroundings. In this case, with its scene of haystacks at harvest time, most probably on the island of Alsen where Nolde spent most of his summers between 1907 and 1910, Nolde's dramatic sweeps and smears of brilliantly-coloured paint build an active surface that pulsates with its own dynamic energy and life. Swiftly executed in a series of largely intuitive responses to the feeling in him generated by this flat Northern landscape towards sunset, Nolde's intense colour and rich creamy brushwork here combines to create an almost pantheist vision of the world as an idyll without any recourse to the usual trappings of symbolism. In this respect it is a work that powerfully generates what Ernst Bloch once described as 'the inner aspect of the world'.
Though maintaining a certain degree of faithfulness to outward appearance, Nolde's early landscapes, like those of van Gogh whose art played a defining role in this period, are invocations of the artist's own emotions and intuitive response to the landscape. They are an attempt at transmitting, not just the visual sensation of the scene before him but also the physical and emotional effect this environment instills in man. Landschaft (Landscape) is a powerful example of this tendency of Nolde's art to convey a heightened experience of nature through the medium of his immediate surroundings. In this case, with its scene of haystacks at harvest time, most probably on the island of Alsen where Nolde spent most of his summers between 1907 and 1910, Nolde's dramatic sweeps and smears of brilliantly-coloured paint build an active surface that pulsates with its own dynamic energy and life. Swiftly executed in a series of largely intuitive responses to the feeling in him generated by this flat Northern landscape towards sunset, Nolde's intense colour and rich creamy brushwork here combines to create an almost pantheist vision of the world as an idyll without any recourse to the usual trappings of symbolism. In this respect it is a work that powerfully generates what Ernst Bloch once described as 'the inner aspect of the world'.