In the early 20th century, artists like Emil Nolde and Max Pechstein searched for "primitive authenticity" in the German colonies. Here's what they found.
Inspired by exotic landscapes even before he went to the South Sea islands: Max Pechtein's 'Summer in the dunes' (1911) Image: akg-images/picture alliance
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When the painter Max Pechstein boarded the luxury steamer Derfflinger in May 1914 to travel to one of the German colonies in the South Seas, he was at the height of his artistic career.
Within a few years he had made a name for himself in Berlin, and art critics celebrated his new, radically modern way of painting. The young Pechstein was seen as a remarkable artist of the newly born expressionist movement.
But why did Pechstein decide to leave exactly at that moment the cultural metropolis of Berlin to move to the Palau Islands in the Pacific, which were since 1899 under the colonial rule of the then German Empire?
German expressionists and colonialism
Exhibitions at Berlin's Brücke-Museum and the Kunsthaus Dahlem show how German colonial legacy inspired an entire artistic movement.
Image: Groninger Museum/Marten de Leeuw
The primitivist art movement
Bright, contrasting colors, simplified forms, and a return to a supposedly simple life untouched by industrialization are among the features of primitivism. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's "Still Life with Flowers and Sculptures" (1912) is a primary example. In Germany, this style was at the height of popularity when imperial Germany was a colonial power.
Image: Groninger Museum/Marten de Leeuw
'Whose Expression?' exhibition in Berlin's Brücke-Museum
Due to the large-scale export of objects from the colonies, the artists of the German expressionist movement, known as the Brücke artists, had easy access to non-European aesthetics. This sketch by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was made after studying bronze reliefs from the Kingdom of Benin, which were taken and kept in storage in Dresden's Ethnological Museum.
Image: Kirchner Museum Davos
Inspiration or appropriation?
The expressionist group was especially interested by one object in the Dresden Ethnological Museum: an ornate roof beam from a Palauan meeting house. The Brücke artists even said "discovering" it in the museum was the spark that prompted them to start their artistic movement. The people in the background of this oil painting by Max Pechstein were copied from the figures depicted on the beam.
Image: akg-images/picture alliance
Paul Gauguin as an inspiration
French painter Paul Gauguin was certainly the most important role model for the art of the Brücke group. His Tahiti paintings brought him great fame posthumously, although he was embroiled in scandal in his lifetime. Nonetheless, his success, as well as the prospect of financial gain, was a reason for both Emil Nolde and Max Pechstein to set out for the South Sea themselves.
Image: Erich Lessing/akg-images/picture alliance
Kirchner's Berlin atelier
German artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (pictured here with his partner Erna Schilling) preferred to be surrounded by "exotic" sculptures, tapestries, fabrics and furniture. Some of them came from the colonies, while Kirchner designed others himself — yet he had never actually traveled to any of these countries.
Image: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner/Kirchner Museum Davos
A looted work, falsely attributed
This wooden seat with a leopard motif was long thought to be the work of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Yet the carving originated in what is now Cameroon, where it belonged to courtly elites. The current exhibitions in Berlin aim to research the origins of pieces such as this one, which were most likely looted, in order to understand them in their original context.
Image: Bundner Kunstmuseum Chur
More than just 'his Tolai wife'
In addition to the exhibition at the Brücke-Museum, a second exhibition at the neighboring Kunsthaus Dahlem aims to give voice to people who were colonized. In the pictured work, artist Lisa Hilli adds the name of the woman in the picture, laWarwakai, to an archival photograph of a white man and a woman captioned simply as "his Tolai wife" to show she was not simply a nameless subordinate.
Image: Courtesy of the artist
muSa Michelle Mattiuzzi: Abolition Garden
Kunsthaus Dahlem invited contemporary artists to comment on the colonial histories of works. The Brazilian artist's installation is meant to recall vases that people placed in their windows as a sign of solidarity for the abolition of slavery in Brazil. The triangular shapes and trident-like structures pay homage to Black feminism, while making a statement against racism and sexism.
Image: Roman März
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The search for authenticity
There are several reasons for Max Pechstein's trip: After meeting the Dresden artists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Erich Heckel, Max Pechstein joined their artists' group, Die Brücke (The Bridge), which, along with Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), is still renowned as Germany's most famous expressionist group.
Pechstein and his peers were against the narrow social and artistic rules of the empire and instead longed for "primitive authenticity."
They sought to depict the "unspoiled unity of nature and man" through their art, as Max Pechstein later put it in his autobiography. And the artists believed to find this idealized state of the world in the German colonies of the South Seas.
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The primitivists profited from colonialism
The exhibition "Whose Expression? The Brücke Artists and Colonialism" at the Brücke-Museum in Berlin looks into how artists of the Brücke movement were fascinated by the various cultural assets that were brought from the colonies to the German Empire, such as the ornate roof beams of a "men's house," which were common on the Palau Islands. One such piece is now part of the Dresden Museum of Ethnology's collection.
Without traveling to the German colonies, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was also inspired by the styleImage: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam/Erik and Petra Hesmerg
According to the widespread Western views of the time, every society was to develop over the course of history from a wild, primitive state of nature into a civilized, cultured people.
While the colonial powers saw themselves at the forefront of civilization, they gave the colonized peoples the status of primitive people.
This supposedly primitive and therefore authentic approach was what fascinated the Brücke artists and incited them to study the colonized people's art and imitate their aesthetics in their own works of art. This is why their artistic style is also referred to as primitivism.
The Brücke artists did not reflect on the origins or the context of acquisition of the often stolen cultural assets in the museums originally; the recent concept of cultural appropriation was obviously not an issue in the colonial empire.
A series of portraits made by Emil Nolde during his stay on a South Sea islandImage: Carsten Rehder/dpa/picture alliance
Paul Gauguin and the South Seas myth
But it wasn't just works exhibited in ethnological museums that motivated Max Pechstein or Emil Nolde — another Brücke artist who set out a few months before him — to live in the German colonies in the Pacific.
A few decades earlier, the French painter Paul Gauguin had moved from France to Tahiti, and later to the Marquesas island of Hiva Oa.
After his death in 1903, Gauguin's paintings from the South Seas were high in demand on the European art market. Gauguin's posthumous success was probably also due to the fact that his works reproduced a myth that had been circulating in Europe for over a century through 18th-century seafarers' travel reports: Islands like Tahiti were stylized as a utopian natural paradise where free and public love was practiced like a religion.
Allured by this myth, Gauguin left his wife and children in Marseille to live in the South Seas.
Gauguin ended up living there with a barely 13-year-old girl, which for a long time was downplayed as a simple love affair. But the painter did not find an untouched South Sea paradise on the colonized island. On the contrary, in his travel diary "Noa Noa," he wrote that he was "disgusted by all the European triviality" and "disappointed by things that were so far from what I wanted and above all imagined."
He however did not express this disappointment in his paintings, and the same story was to be repeated with the German Expressionists.
Impoverished outsider: Paul Gauguin
Nowadays, his paintings cost millions, but during his lifetime, the French painter and adventurist Paul Gauguin could only dream of so much wealth.
Image: Privatsammlung
Sailor, bank clerk and amateur painter
Before Paul Gauguin decided to become a painter, he spent his time cruising on the world's oceans and working as an investment banker at the Paris Bourse. He earned quite a lot of money and founded a family with five children. The impressionists, holding his amateur paintings in great esteem, encouraged him to present them in their exhibititions - and that's when his social decline began.
Image: J. Karpinski
A career as an artist
At the age of 35, Gauguin radically changes his entire life by turning his hobby into a career. Culture and nature, mysticism and eroticism, dream and reality are the subjects which he tries to tackle in his paintings. Typical for his style are bold colors, large stretches of color, clear contours and lines and rather simplified designs.
Image: akg-images
Fascinated by the supernatural realm
Gauguin flees from civilization, at first to Brittany where he studies traditional costumes and customs, combining a simple lifestyle with Bible stories. In "The Vision of the Sermon" (1888) he tries to depict the supernatural. The women farmers look at Jacob and an angel struggling with each other. But the scene is not real - it rather takes place in their imagination.
Image: Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh
Artist facing crucifixion
In the artist village of Pont-Aven, Gauguin is admired for his post-impressionist works. Following a trip to Panama and Martinique, he reluctantly accepts an invitation from Vincent van Gogh to live with him in an artist community in Arles. However, the trip ends in a disaster. Gauguin feels a higher calling: he himself makes an appearance as Jesus Christ in "Christ on the Mount of Olives" (1889).
Image: Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach,
Between truth and illusion
Gauguin's next destination is Tahiti where he hopes to find freedom at last. But following an invasion of Europeans, the island hardly proves idyllic. The painter laments the "grotesque imitation of our customs, fashions, vices and ridiculous aspects of cultural life." Nevertheless, Gauguin's paintings, much glorifying idleness, show Tahiti as a paradise.
The Tahitians have lost their original instincts, and yet have stayed as beautiful as works of art, Gauguin notes. His paintings satisfy the needs of Europeans longing for exotic beauty and purity. Although exoticism is in high demand in Europe, and few desire Gauguin's art. He continues to live in poverty. His wife has left him and moved to Denmark with their children.
Image: Ole Haupt
The wild European
Impoverished, he returns to France two years later: "wilder than when I left - and yet more knowledgeable." Success continues to elude him, so he returns to Tahiti - fed up with life. Even his suicide attempt fails. He continues to paint. He also writes for satirical magazines confronting the colonial administration and the Catholic Church.
Image: Staatliches Museum für Bildenden Künste A.S. Puschkin, Moskau
Twilight recognition
He pulls himself together once again, producing his most monumental work: "Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going to?" (1897). It shows the cycle of life - from birth to death, with all the fears and joys between. He finally receives the recognition he has so longed for: the Parisian art dealer Ambroise Vollard offers to support Gauguin financially.
Image: 2015 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Lonely death in paradise
Alcohol, frail health and ongoing disputes with the colonial administration wear down the painter who produces less and less. At the age of 55, he dies on the Marquesas island of La Dominique where he had produced "Barbaric Tales" (1902). Behind the natives squats a European - the Dutch painter Meyer de Haan, whom Gauguin once met in Brittany.
Image: Museum Folkwang, Essen
From an unknown to an icon
Paul Gauguin himself had always been confident of his ability, but only after his death collectors and museums started to show more interest in his art. Today he is one of the most famous representatives of European painting.
Image: Privatsammlung
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Omitting references to colonial structures
Max Pechstein and Emil Nolde were also confronted to the strong contrast between the idealized images they had of the islands and the on-site colonial reality.
The merchant ships and warships in the ports, the telegraph lines in the countryside or the Indigenous people who were forced to do labor did not fit in with their artistic search for unspoiled nature, so they were not depicted in their paintings either.
Paradoxically, it was precisely these colonial structures that made contact with the supposedly primitive people possible in the first place.
The Pechstein couple seemed to dismiss the fact that they were living in a colonial context in their daily lives. After their luxurious crossing on the cruise ship to the Palau Islands, Lotte Pechstein complained in her diary about the oppressive climate and her boredom. When the Japanese occupied the islands in 1914 at the beginning of the First World War, Lotte and Max Pechstein were surprised and disappointed that the Indigenous people did not side with the Germans.
Despite his ethnic-nationalist views and his general approval of colonialism, Emil Nolde was apparently more sensitive to colonial injustice.
After his return from the colonies, he wrote in his 1936 autobiography that colonialism is "a brutal affair," and that he had witnessed the Europeans' violent, "raw and radical" approach with the Indigenous people.
The painter also recognized that the distinction between primitive and civilized, which was so important to justify colonialism, was primarily maintained by keeping the Indigenous voiceless.
He also predicted this could one day change: "If a colonial history is ever written from the perspective of the natives, then we white Europeans will have to hide in caves in shame."
Emil Nolde, the German expressionist 'degenerate' painter with Nazi convictions
One of the most important contributors to German expressionism, Emil Nolde is the focus of several exhibitions in Germany this year. Yet the chancellor's office has had his paintings removed due to his Nazi past.
Image: Nolde Stiftung Seebüll
'Breaker' in the chancellor's office
The 1936 painting "Breaker" hung in Chancellor Angela Merkel's study until recently. Showing a breaking wave under a sky that is painted blood red, the painting was on loan from the Berlin State Museums, which had requested its return to be included in an exhibition about Nolde's work in Berlin. Afterward, it will not return to the Chancellery, the result of the painter's troubled biography.
Image: picture-alliance/ dpa
'Paradise Lost' (1921)
Emil Nolde (1867-1956) is regarded as one of the most famous painters of German expressionism. Nolde's expressive use of color is one his trademarks. His bright watercolors in particular have drawn in many followers and continue to attract art enthusiasts. On the art market, Nolde's works are in demand and sell for high prices. This 1921 painting by Nolde is titled "Paradise Lost."
Image: Nolde Stiftung Seebüll/Fotowerkstatt Elke Walford
A change in story
Emil Nolde had more works confiscated and displayed as "degenerate art" under the Nazis than any other artist. But Nolde was a opportunist, creating his own narrative. Before 1945, he saw himself as misjudged and persecuted by Jews. However, after the war, he presented himself as a victim of the Nazi regime. Researchers are uncovering his biographical inconsistencies.
Image: Nolde Stiftung Seebüll/Dirk Dunkelberg
Not an artist of the Nazi state
Although Emil Nolde wasn't one, he would have liked to become an official state artist for the Nazis. According to art historians, Nolde was an anti-Semite, committed to the Third Reich, who joined the National Socialist Association of Northern Schleswig in 1934 at the age of 67. He even wrote a plan to remove Jews from the country.
Image: picture alliance/akg-images
The painter and the Nazi system
Joseph Goebbels, confidant of Hitler and minister of propaganda for the Third Reich, is shown here visiting the "Degenerate Art Exhibition" in Berlin in 1938. The show displayed banned pieces that had been removed from museums, including the confiscated works of painter Emil Nolde. This deeply affected the artist. But, as new research shows, he remained staunchly committed to the Nazi ideology.
Image: Zentralarchiv - Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
'The Sinner' (1926)
The art of anti-Semitic artist Emil Nolde no longer has a place in the German Chancellery. The work of another expressionist, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, is set to be displayed in Merkel's study. In an office that welcomes foreign heads of state in which Germany is keen to show its best side, what can be taken from the art that hangs on its walls? This painting by Nolde is called "The Sinner".
Image: Nolde Stiftung Seebüll/Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Opening the Nolde archive in Seebüll
The Nolde Foundation in Seebüll occupies the space where the artist once lived and worked from 1930 until his death in 1956. Every year, thousands of Nolde fans visit the museum exploring his life and work. It was not until the opening of the Nolde archive in 2013 that the foundation brought controversial new insights about Nolde's biography to light.
Image: picture-alliance/blickwinkel/G. Franz
Can you separate the art from the artist?
In Berlin in 2019, the exhibitions "A German Legend. Emil Nolde and the Nazi Regime" at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum and "Escape into Art? The Brücke Painters in the Nazi Period" at the Brücke Museum aim to question the myth surrounding Nolde. Whether or not the works can be separated from the artist is a heated point of discussion.
