Astrid Becker

Emil Nolde (1867-1956) was one of the greatest colourists of the twentieth century. An artist passionate about his north German home near the Danish border, with its immense skies, flat, windswept landscapes and storm-tossed seas, he was equally fascinated by the demi-monde of Berlin's cafes and cabarets, the busy to and fro of tugboats in the port of Hamburg and the myriad of peoples and places he saw on his trip to the South Seas in 1914. Nolde felt strongly about what he painted, identifying with his subjects in every brushstroke he made, heightening his colours and simplifying his shapes, so that we, the viewers, can also experience his emotional response to the world about him. This is what makes Nolde one of Germany's greatest expressionist artists. This book, comprising five essays, has over 100 illustrations drawn from the incomparable collection of the Emil Nolde Foundation in Seebull (the artist's former home in north Germany). It covers Nolde's complete career, from his early atmospheric paintings of his homeland right through to the intensely coloured, so-called 'unpainted paintings', works done on small pieces of paper during the Third Reich when Nolde was branded a 'degenerate'.

What is Visible and What is Not Mischa Kuball (b. 1959, Du]sseldorf; lives and works in Du]sseldorf) investigates public and institutional spaces and the social and political discourses that shape them. At the invitation of the Draiflessen Collection and with support from the Nolde Stiftung, the conceptual artist grappled with the life and oeuvre of the painter Emil Nolde (1867-1956) and created a body of work titled Nolde/critique/Kuball. In piece after piece, Kuball drains Nolde's works of the colors that made the Expressionist famous, challenging the beholder's preconceptions and examining perception and its constituent processes. Laid out in black and white, the book accordingly directs our attention not only to what a picture shows, but also to how structures and organizing principles emerge into view. Mischa Kuball has been professor of public art at the Kunsthochschule fu]r Medien K ln, and associate professor of media art at the Staatliche Hochschule fu]r Gestaltung/ZKM Karlsruhe since 2007.