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Dimensions: 72 by 86cm.
28 3/8 by 33 7/8 in.
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Provenance: PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE EUROPEAN COLLECTION
Victor Peters, Leipzig (acquired before 1930)
Hans Peters, Dangast
Veit Vogel, Munich
Galerie Stangl, Munich
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1962
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Exhibited: Bielefeld, Kunsthaus, Emil Nolde, 1951, no. 7
Munich, Galerie Stangl, 1962
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Literature: Artist's Handlist, 1910c, no. 523
Artist's Handlist, 1930: '1914 Bewegte See I (2 Segler u 1 kl. Dampfer)'
Martin Urban, Emil Nolde, Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil-Paintings, 1895-1914, London, 1987, vol. I, no. 608, illustrated p. 532
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Notes: Taking on a tradition started by Paul Gauguin, and followed by a number of early twentieth-century artists, Emil Nolde set out to the South Seas in 1913. Having lived in Berlin for many years, and having exhausted the themes of its nightlife in his paintings of 1910 to 1913, Nolde decided to travel to unknown countries in search of more 'primitive' lifestyle and new inspiration for his art. In the autumn 1913 he accepted an invitation to participate in a 'medical-demographic' expedition sponsored by the German Reichskolonialamt (Imperial Colonial Office), bound for New Guinea. The expedition left Berlin in October 1913, and arrived at its destination in mid-December.
Executed upon his return to Europe in the autumn of 1914, the present work evokes the wilderness of the South Seas, and reflects Nolde's desire to provide not just a depiction of nature, but to express his emotional response to it, to create a visual equivalent of a physical experience. As Max Sauerlandt observed: 'Nolde understands the sea like no other painter before him. He sees it not from the beach or from a boat but as it exists as itself, devoid of any reference to man, eternally in motion, ever changing, living out its life in and for itself: a divine, self-consuming, primal force that, in its untrammeled freedom, has existed unchanged since the very first day of creation [...] He has painted the sea in all its permutations, but above all in stormy agitation, its heavy swell transformed into white breakers as it retreats upon itself, beneath heavy, threatening clouds, behind which the autumnal evening sky bleeds in tones of red and deepest orange' (M. Sauerlandt, Emil Nolde, Munich, 1921, pp. 49-50).
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