(Aya Soika)

About the Work

Emil Nolde, Jägers Haus auf Alsen (Jäger’s House on Alsen), 1909

Emil Nolde’s later criticism of Impressionism is surprising in view of this painting; rich in contrast yet still rendered in small brushstrokes, Nolde applied oil paints to the canvas aiming for a pictorial effect fundamentally different from that of his flat painting style in subsequent years. It is still very much characteristic of his work, even if only from a distance: in the foreground the flowering bushes, in the background the neighbour’s farmhouse. A path leads the eye to the entryway. While Nolde spent winters in Berlin, he used summers to work in an old fishing cottage on the island of Als (Alsen) in the Baltic Sea. There, beginning in 1906, he created numerous garden scenes with colourful flowerbeds. The gardens on the island fascinated the artist since he could use them to experiment with the visual effects of his oil paintings. In his autobiography Jahre der Kämpfe (Years of Struggle, 1934), he emphasises the near magical appeal of the summer flowers: “It was in the middle of summer. The colours of the flowers attracted me irresistibly, and almost immediately I would get to painting. […] The blooming colours of the flowers and the purity of these colours, I loved them.” For Nolde nature became an irresistible temptation. In his later reflections on his artistic development, the discovery of the expressive capacity of colour played as big a role for him as it did for the works of his younger Brücke colleagues. Nolde nevertheless turned his back on the community by the end of 1907 after less than two years of membership.

The story of this painting’s provenance is especially interesting. While still in Nolde’s possession, the painting was first exhibited as early as 1910 at the Galerie Commeter in Hamburg and shortly thereafter at the Kunstverein in Münster and Jena. In 1919, he finally sold the work to the Hamburger Kunsthalle, where it enriched the institution’s foundational collection of modern art. The fact that this landscape painting was among those removed as “degenerate” in 1937 must have been confounding to Nolde. From his perspective, his aesthetic motifs and expressive style corresponded to a “Nordic,” genuinely German form of art, which would have been compatible with the ideas of the Nazi regime – not least because he was himself an adherent of Nationalist Socialist ideology. The painting survived the Second World War unscathed in the possession of the art dealer Bernhard Boehmer, who was entrusted with the “liquidation” of the works. It returned to a public collection when it was acquired by the Brücke-Museum in 1979.