Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 13 Number 3, December 2012
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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.”