Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

Archive

 

 

Volume 13 Number 3, December 2012

___________________________________________________________________

EMIL NOLDE: SELF-PORTRAIT, 1917

 

The yellow and white of his wide brimmed hat

with its black band has fallen into yellow

and green in his face. His right eye is larger

than his left, both are blue and his nose is straight.

 

His moustaches rest like wings above his red mouth.

White shirt, blue tie (darker than his eyes). The left side

of his jacket (linen?) is white, the right side is black

with streaks of white. He’s either emerging

out of a dark-grey and white cloud or he is going

to fade into it.  He looks quite serious.

 

He stares, perhaps into the future, perhaps seeing a bridge

between what was and what’s coming, but he’s not looking

at me.  I’m looking at him, trying to see if I can spy

a single brushstroke of irony or a trace prefiguring

his eventual and early involvement with the Nazis

and his prominence in Entartete Kunst.

 

I can’t spot any irony in this portrait of himself at fifty.

I’m reading into it.  I can’t help it.  Nor can I help smiling at the fact

that after being forbidden to paint (in 1941) he began creating

watercolors in secret, calling them “unpainted pictures.”

 

 

- Per Brask