Emil Nolde quotes

Emil Nolde was a German-Danish painter and printmaker, recognized as one of the leading figures of German Expressionism. His vivid use of color and bold brushwork made his works instantly recognizable and emotionally powerful. He became both influential and controversial, especially due to his complex relationship with the political movements of his time. Here are 33 of his quotes:

Pictures are spiritual beings. The soul of the painter lives within them.

Emil Nolde

Yellow can paint happiness and also pain.. .Every color harbors its soul within, delighting or repelling and inspiring me.

Emil Nolde

In our own time, every earthenware vessel or piece of jewelry, every utensil or garment, has to be designed on paper before it is made. Primitive peoples, however, create their works with the material itself in the artist's hand, held in his fingers. They aspire to express delight in form and the love of creating it. Absolute originality, the intense and often grotesque expression of power and life in very simple forms – that may be why we like these works of native art.

Emil Nolde

Clever people master life; the wise illuminate it and create fresh difficulties.

Emil Nolde

Art is exalted above religion and race. Not a single solitary soul these days believes in the religions of the Assyrians, the Egyptians and the Greeks... Only their art, whenever it was beautiful, stands proud and exalted, rising above all time.

Emil Nolde

The art of an artist must be his own art. It is... always a continuous chain of little inventions, little technical discoveries of ones own, in ones relation to the tool, the material and the colors.

Emil Nolde

What an artist learns matters little. What he himself discovers has a real worth for him, and gives him the necessary incitement to work.

Emil Nolde

The artist need not know very much; best of all let him work instinctively and paint as naturally as he breathes or walks.

Emil Nolde

Since then, much has changed. We do not care for Raphael, and are less enthusiastic about the statues of the so-called golden age of Greece. Our predecessors' ideals are not ours. Works signed by great names over the centuries appeal to us less. In the hurry and bustle of their times, worldly-wise artists created works for Popes and palaces. It is the ordinary people who laboured in their workshops and of whose lives scarcely anything is now known, whose very names have not come down to us, that we love and respect today in their plain, large-scale carvings in the cathedrals of Naumburg, Magdeburg and Bamberg.

Emil Nolde

Therefore etching produces a different result from the ten drawings of the same character... [The etchings are] better, in that they are fresher, bolder, and freer..

Emil Nolde

.. colors are my notes for fashioning sounds and chords with and against one another.

Emil Nolde

Not long ago only a few artistic periods were thought suitable for museums. Then they were joined by exhibitions of Coptic and early Christian art, Greek terracotta's and vases, Persian and Islamic art. But why is Indian, Chinese and Javanese art still classified under ethnology or anthropology? And why is the art of primitive peoples not considered art at all?

Emil Nolde

I had innumerable visions at that time [c. 1903]; wherever I looked, Nature was alive, the sky, the clouds, on every stone and among the branches of the trees, everywhere my creatures stirred and lived their still or wild, lively lives, arousing my excitement and crying out to be painted.

Emil Nolde

I want so much for my work to grow forth out of the material, just as in nature the plants grow forth out of the earth, which corresponds to their character. In the print 'Lebensfreude' [Joy of living] I worked for the most part with my finger, and the effect I hoped for was achieved. There is hidden in the print a bit of wantonness, in the representation as well as in the boldness of the technique. If I were to make the "ragged and moving" contours "correctly" in the academic sense, this effect would not nearly be achieved.

Emil Nolde

The materials, the colors, were like friendship and love, both wanting to fulfill themselves in the most beautiful form.

Emil Nolde

You speak of errors... Men who are so correct and flawless are mostly boring; small weaknesses can be loved... One chief characteristic of the etchings gives me much pleasure: because out of them streams forth a tremendous life.

Emil Nolde

In the working of wood and for the determining of its character I had had enough experience in my five-year pursuit of woodcutting. I also always gladly let the various charming grainings and sometimes the knots become involved in the printing.

Emil Nolde

It was in mid-summer [1906]. The colors of the flowers attracted me irresistibly and almost sudden I was painting. My first small gardens paintings were born.

Emil Nolde

When I was a child, eight or ten years old, I made a solemn promise to God that, when I grew up, I would write him a hymn for the prayer-book. The vow has never been fulfilled. But I have painted a large number of pictures, and there must be more than thirty religious ones. I wonder if they will do instead.

Emil Nolde

It [the city Berlin] stinks of perfume, they have water on their brains and they live as food for bacilli and shamelessly like dogs.

Emil Nolde

Dualism is particularly important in both my paintings and my graphics.

Emil Nolde

Every true artist creates new values, new beauty... When you notice anarchy, recklessness, or licentiousness in works of contemporary art, when you notice crass coarseness and brutality, then occupy yourself long and painstakingly precisely with these works, and you will suddenly recognize how the seeming recklessness transforms itself into freedom, the coarseness into high refinements. Harmless pictures are seldom worth anything.

Emil Nolde