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Given Emil Nolde's portrayal of his Biblical figures as Jews with "primitive," sometimes grotesque features that often tend towards caricature, I decided last spring to write a masters thesis on Nolde's Mary of Egypt triptych, focusing on his use of primitivism as it relates to issues of gender, race, and ethnicity. From the beginning of this project, the counterpoint to the problematic nature of these representations has been my own emotional, almost naive attraction to the images. How, I began to ask, is it possible to reconcile this sort of visceral response to the paintings, with the complicated implications engendered by Nolde's appropriation of elements from non-Western art?
With this question in mind, I traveled to Europe in August in order to look at the triptych, as well as a number of paintings related to the series. In Copenhagen, I visited the Staatens Museum for Kunst, which owns eight of Nolde's paintings, including The Last Supper and one of his many stillifes with "primitive" objects. At my next stop, the Nolde Stiftung near Neukirchen, Germany, I saw the monumental Life of Christ polyptych and Der Hemcher, the latter of which provides a clear indication of the influence of Orientalism on Nolde's art. The highlight of this visit, however, was a private viewing of a painting that has never been exhibited, a piece originally entitled Urwetb und JungJing and later changed to Maria Aegyptiaca.
From Neukirchen, I traveled to Hamburg and the Hamburg Kunsthalle where I was able to spend a considerable amount of time in front of the triptych: Legende: Die Heiige Maria von Aegypten. Interestingly, the central panel is larger than the other two, so that along with its predominantly warm coloration and the emphatic gesture of its figure, this panel commands the viewer's attention at the expense of the other two paintings. In person, the first panel is garish, grotesque, and difficult to look at, while in comparison, the final panel is practically lifeless and flat. In Essen, my final destination, I visited the Museum Folkwang, home to a number of Nolde's religious paintings, including a second version of the final panel of the Mary of Egypt triptych. In contrast to the painting in Hamburg, this work is vivid and compelling, an image of life or spiritual redemption through death, as opposed to the odd lifelessness represented in the Hamburg painting.
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