Nolde Question

While working on my novel When the Colors Sing, about The Blue Rider (Der blaue Reiter) movement, especially Kandinsky, Münter and Marc, I came across the work of Emil Nolde and his struggles with the development of his art. Readers of this blog will know I recently visited his house – now a museum – in Seebüll, North Frisia, to get a better feeling of his surroundings and the areas where he liked to work.

Having dipped a bit deeper in Nolde’s bio, I came back with more questions than I went with; which is something I appreciate. For instance, I kept thinking, how did Emil Nolde hold the tension between his art and his craft; between his personal, conservative philosophy and his experimental and liberating work; between his roots in the farming community and artistically, in a German tradition of painting, and freedom of expression in his own artistic explorations of landscape, nature and humans. In other words, how did Nolde carry his own, individual cross to produce such work of great depth, intensity, and appeal?

Interesting questions? There is no easy answer to them, of course. And no answer will be attempted here. Just a few facts I gathered about Nolde, and a few links that might spark some new lines of enquiry.

Coming from a family of farmers, Nolde, acting on his father’s wishes, trained and worked as a woodcarver and furniture designer. He also took drawing classes, and taught drawing in a variety of venues.

He came to painting later. Having been rejected by the Munich Art Academy, like Kandinsky, Nolde took private painting lessons and visited Paris and other European art centers. His rejection seems to have driven him to cast his net wider and to look at and absorb other styles and ideas. The Parisian Impressionism, the angular and extreme approach of the artists of Die Brücke, the work of the group The Berlin Secession, the spiritual expressionism of Der Blaue Reiter influenced the development of his work. Bright pigments, free brushstrokes, search for the essence/soul of the subject, mystical and symbolic preoccupations became his ongoing concerns and he found his own way of depicting them on canvas and paper.

While he exhibited with all these groups in the earlier part of the twentieth century, Nolde was an individualist at heart, happiest while painting, not in society or groups of artists. He cut links with all groups after a while.

Nolde became one of the most known and respected painters up to the 1930s even in the climate of racial hatred and divisive currents that were deepening within German society at that time. In part, this success may have to do with similarities between Nolde’s ideas and those of nationalist groups and even Nazi philosophy, as some have argued.

Nevertheless, his popularity and individualistic expressionist ideography did not sit well with some members of the National Socialist Party at least, and with Hitler in particular – another “painter” rejected by the Munich Art Academy – who saw Expressionism as “corrupting” and “degenerate art.” Nolde’s work was confiscated and exhibited with other expressionist paintings in the infamous Munich exhibition “Degenerate Art” – an exhibition meant to humiliate the artists and their work.

Nolde painted his Unpainted Pictures during this period, especially from 1941 onwards when he was officially prohibited to paint. While he meant to render these small-scale watercolors in oil one day, most of them remained unpainted. I wonder what this means. What it is these pictures represent. Might one say that they help, like free associations, lead to the not so obvious, not so known Nolde?

The novel Deutschstunde, The German Lesson, by Siegfried Lenz, published in 1968, was inspired by Nolde and the time of his being prohibited to paint. While the name of the painter, as well as of those in his immediate circle, has been changed (to Nansen, a paraphrase of Nolde’s family name: Hansen), there is an unmistakable line of character and biographical detail running through the novel. As a novel, it is original, well-thought out, extremely well-written and atmospheric. Even the landscape speaks!

Lenz, in this novel, contributes a major idea about Nolde and his work. By pitting him against someone (a policeman) deadened by his unthinking and unwavering dedication to duty and discipline (namely, to enforce the painting ban that Nansen/Nolde had been subjected to), Lenz shows Nolde’s individualism, dedication to his art, as well as conscience, and sense of moral responsibility.

Might this juxtaposition in Lenz’s novel serve as a clue to thinking about Nolde’s balancing of opposing elements? A clue to his ability to survive adversity and continue his artistic development without selling-out his soul?  Certainly worth thinking about.

Photo credit: Maria Pierides www.mariapierides.co.uk

6 September 2010

Murnau Moor

I am delighted and  honored! My micro-poem They send light to Earth was chosen to be the first piece to be published by new e-zine @textofiction.

Brand new, “Textofiction is an online literary publication dedicated to bringing the best writing in under 140 characters.”

Read my micro-poem and think, it packs a lot in. Better still, let me know your thoughts about it! Read it here

Date of publication: 29 August 2010

David vs Goliath

A tribe in India has won a stunning victory over one of the world’s biggest mining companies. The Dongria Kondh, a tribe of 8000 people, with the help of Survival International and others, has won a victory over a multibillion company which proposed to mine bauxite on the sacred hills of the tribe. The Dongria Kondh’s struggle had a happier ending than that of the film Avatar, in which a tribe was pitted against a ruthless mining company. The Dongria Kondh’s perseverance, courage, and victory will encourage indigenous tribes everywhere.

Well done to Dongria Kondh, their supporters, and to Survival!

"ArTherapy" in Gazi

At this year’s (2010) Munich Film Festival I watched Nikos Perakis’ new film “ArTherapy”.  I found it an intelligent, exciting and enjoyable film, mixing documentary with fiction.

The protagonists, young students of the National Theatre School of Drama, mostly middle-class, politically conscious and wholly devoted to their art, work tirelessly in the face of adversity in the Athenian capital. The portrayal of the young, the intensity and aliveness of Athenian life, the wonderful development of the culture centre in the centre of historic and multicultural Athens, aptly named Technopolis, made me feel proud of my Greek roots. And yet, however much I enjoyed the movie, I felt there was something missing: something about the context, the place, the area was lacking. There were interviews with a few locals, but overall, I was left wondering who was the art therapy for, who is in need of it and why? An unfair question, perhaps, or even an irrelevant one. And yet.

Of course one answer to this question might be that it is the young generation addressed in the film that needs it, the generation of Greeks facing high unemployment, debt and deficit, of a politically traumatized youth, but this too did not seem enough to help understand my unease. In addition, a more complete answer might be that the fans need the art therapy too: “There is no better time to offer your fans an artistic therapy against the period of an economic crisis and fear from the forthcoming social shock. Told in the style of Fame Story…” the GR reporter wrote about the film. Of course…and perhaps!

I followed my usual pattern when in doubt: I googled Gazi. Taking its name from the Public Gas Works, which existed there for over a century, Gazi was, for most of its existence a poor area, where poverty, prostitution and immigration went hand in hand. And then I came across an article in Balkanologie about the people of Gazi.

The author of the paper, Dimitris Antoniou, wrote about the late immigrants to the area who arrived from the 1980ies and 1990ies onwards: Muslims from Northern Greece, from the Western Thrace migrating internally to Athens. Influenced by the Treaty of Lausanne, as well as the Greco-Turkish volatile relations and tit-for-tat policies, these people had found it hard to settle in Western Thrace, with scores migrating to Turkey, other countries, as well as to Athens, whenever possible. Antoniou followed their settlement patterns in the capital, their struggle for survival from earning a living through establishing cultural and religious associations to working out a distinct identity as a group.

Five years after the publication of this paper, I cannot find any further information about the people described and how they fared in the face of the massive redevelopment of the area.

Given the importance of this area as migration destination of Muslim Thracians, I now wonder what impact development has already had or might have on this group of people. Would it lead to the complete demise of this community in the name of progress, or might there be a new way of helping to engage and support the community in its search for and expression of its social and cultural identity? Would there be a way that the arts and crafts flourishing in the Gazi Technopolis might aid the survival of this community? That could also be a form of art therapy!

(Picture credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gazi_Technopolis.jpg)

I was reminded of Sartre’s “Hell is other people.” Not the way he meant it – which was that if our relationship with a particular person is  bad, then our being with them becomes hell;  but the way it is usually understood, namely, that all other people are, and our relating with them is, torture.

I wonder what Sartre would have made of the idea that all humankind could theoretically be squeezed into a sugar cube! Horror of horrors! He might well have been a bit more appreciative of the already existing space inside and in-between other people’s atoms.

Now that’s a thought (for a short story).

I see that the ideas in the photo essay are explored in Chown’s “The Matchbox That Ate A Forty-Ton Truck: What everyday things tell us about the universe.” Well then, I am off to get this book…

For an essay on the quote “Hell is other people” see: http://legacy.lclark.edu/~clayton/commentaries/hell.html

Also, for the real thing:  http://www.sartre.org/

No Exit, the play from which the quotation arises http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Exit

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marcus-chown/11-of-the-craziest-things_b_628481.html#s107477

Photo credit:  Constantina Pierides

Click for Maria’s website

Beyond Madness Psychosocial Interventions in Psychosis

Edited by Joseph H. Berke, Margaret Fagan, George Mak-Pearce and Stella Pierides-Müller

Paperback 1-85302-889-4, 2001, 240 pages, £17.95 $29.95

BIC: MMJT MBPK JCAF JCF

Number 7 in the Community, Culture and Change series