Friday 23 March, 4.30pm, Seminar Room, IASH
Frances Blythe (Edinburgh): Emil Nolde: Landscapes of Loss
[German Research Seminar]
This paper explores the landscape painting of the artist Emil Nolde (1867-1956) as a means to reflect upon his relationship with his Heimat (home or homeland) in the turbulent first half of the twentieth century. As a consequence of the German-Danish border shifting in the aftermath of the First World War, the rural marshland landscapes of Nolde's native Schleswig-Holstein changed when Danes moved to implement drainage interventions in their newly acquired territory. Ancient mills and farmhouses were torn down to make way for dykes. Nolde lamented the loss of the age-old features of the land in his memoirs, decrying the violence done to his beloved region by the North Sea. In 1921, he painted the artwork Paradise Lost, which depicts Adam and Eve against a green background, the naked pair separated by a serpent. The pain of being corrupted and stripped bare seemed to apply as much to Nolde's native landscape as it did to the biblical couple. By reflecting on the construct of paradise lost as a wider metaphor for Germany and German identity, this paper seeks to explore the complex relationship between landscape and modernity and what this can tell us about notions of a corrupted national cultural heritage.
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