Emil Nolde

Emil Nolde Young couple 1913 Original color lithograph on fine Japanese paper. 61 x 50,3 cm (71 x 57,3/59,2 cm). Framed under glass. Signed, titled and inscribed "of 2 Dr this version No. 2". According to Schiefler, a total of 112 copies exist in 68 color variations. - In beautiful color preservation. Schiefler/Mosel L 52 Provenance Private collection North Rhine-Westphalia The important color lithograph "Young Couple" is one of the largest-format prints Emil Nolde created. It was created before the outbreak of World War I. Until then, Nolde and his wife Ada's center of life was the metropolis of Berlin, where in that year a series of paintings, watercolors, and graphic works was created, the theme of which was the dazzling big-city life in the cafés and on the streets. In his autobiographical text "Years of Struggle," Nolde described how attracted he was to the excesses of the big city: "Every evening at eleven I put on my dark trousers and also the black St. Gallen tailcoat, which was now soon historic. My Ada likewise put on her best dress, and we went to masked balls, to cabarets, to the ice palace. And then we went to public places, where pale as powder and smelling of corpses impotent asphalt lions and hectic half-world ladies sat in their elegantly daring robes. [...] I drew this flip side of life with its makeup, its slippery grime and corruption." (quoted from: Emil Nolde, Jahre der Kämpfe 1902 - 1914, Flensburg 1958, p. 139 f.) The tense depiction of the young couple may also have been created in this context. Against an undefined background, a man in a black tailcoat appears on the left and a dark-haired woman wearing a patterned evening gown or kimono on the right. With a mocking grin, he roughly holds the woman by the wrist - a horrified look and an attempt to break free of the embrace are her reactions. Since Nolde was not a portrait painter in the conventional sense at any point in his creative career, he was also interested in the fundamental tension between the sexes, their feelings of desire, violence and fear in this constellation. Nolde had obviously occupied himself intensively with this outstanding lithograph, because it exists in many different color settings, each of which was printed in only a few copies.