MFA Show Escapes To Nolde's Exotic World

Emile Noide: The Painter's Prints

and Noide Watercolors in America

at the Museum of Fine Arts,

Boston

through May 7

Fifty years before Andy Warhol highlighted Marilyn Monroe's features and repeatedly printed her face, the northern German artist Emile Nolde accentuated a woman's hair, lips and eyebrows in color lithographs to produce a very different effect. Nolde's prints of a "Young Danish Woman" (1913) appear aged, as the Shroud of Turin. Like most of the works in the dazzling show Emile Nolde: The Painter's Prints and its satisfying counterpart Nolde Watercolors in America, the woman is a delicate relic rather than amass-market commodity. By changing his colors Nolde creates different women and reveals their different personalities.

Of the four lithographs in the series, the most iconic "Young Danish Woman" has gold skin and copper hair. Her head and ravishingly long neck float against the shadowy depths of a black background. Beneath her neck, a small rectangle suggests her shirt collar. Her face is sensuously smudged, unlike Warhol's perfect "Marilyn." Lushly foliated, she is as static as a figure on an ancient Egyptian coffin.

Nolde's lithographs appear with his prints, woodcuts, etchings and watercolors in the most comprehensive retrospective of his work since the artist's death in 1956. The exhibits accurately convey just how prolific and innovative Nolde was in the field of printmaking. Working with sporadic intensity, Nolde experimented with colors, painting techniques, materials and papers. He often etched directly onto his metal plates, which created frayed edges and scenes, as in "The Steamer--large, dark" (1910) of velvety mist. In his woodcuts, even the grain of the wood was used to simulate textures.

In several of his watercolors, displayed at the end of the show, Nolde painted on both sides of the paper so that the colors would be richer and deeper. Even his etchings, one plate of which is featured beside the finished print so that all the delicate lines can be inspected, were often done on iron or steel rather than the standard copper. All of these processes attest to Nolde's singular devotion to creating his world, as scary and enticing as it is.

The people in Nolde's works are lost souls: evil and good, freaks and beauties. The two shows contain a wide representation of his portraits, spanning his entire career. In the watercolors, Nolde's figures acquire a doll-like, clownish appearance which manifests itself in surreal examples of innocence. Nolde's darker lithographs, woodcuts and etchings of "goblins and grotesques," and even humans are a periscope into worlds of fantasy and reality.

Nolde illustrated tales from Asian, Oceanic and European folklore. His early "Fairy-Tale" series borrows from these cultures to create realms of magic in everyday life. The first room in Nolde: The Painter's Prints has the feel of a haunted house, whereas the final room of the two conjoined shows, containing his watercolors, exhibits flowers and landscapes in gumdrop colors to a more soothing effect.

Nolde's preference for bright, arbitrary colors hints that dreams and dementia are closely related to reality. As eccentric as his creatures may be, they are beguiling and invite the viewer to escape into a never-ending carnival of unabashed hedonism. In their lush use of brilliant colors, Nolde's works are hypnotic. Nolde often camouflages macabre elements beneath slick colors. The lithograph series of a "Young Couple" (1913) features a red print. Unlike the figures in its green and blue counterparts, the red couple shares a chemistry that is palpably heated and sexual. Nolde's red is so freshly applied that it could be blood submerging the lovers.

Nolde belonged to the radical group, Die Bruke, for a year; and his woodcut portrait, "The Prophet," is one of the most famous examples of their German Expressionism. But the artist did not consider himself cosmopolitan like his contemporaries. This sentiment is emphasized by his deep committment to the land his ancestors had farmed and his native village, from which he took his surname. When Nolde offered a vision of his German homeland, the Nazis not only forbade him to work (with little success), but ridiculed him and other artists in the 1937 exhibit of "Degenerate Art." Their fear of his art is a testament to its ultimate power.

Nolde's life was subject to good and bad bouts of fortune, and he is presented as alienated from most of society, except for his devoted wife. The exhibit's biographical materials portray him as a man interested in the simple things in life--his family, his home, his garden. Nolde's skill was his ability to make the outlandish appear from the mundane, and to make it irresistably enticing.