CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/31/2017

Emil Nolde's wild Grotesques

“Most of these small freely fantastical sheets were produced in a quiet, remote corner of the house during the years when I was despised. They were given to friends for safekeeping; they could not be seen by eyes foreign to art. Most are studies for figural paintings, often grotesque and wild, natural or far removed from nature; I try all possibilities: the deliberate and the random, the understood and the felt.… The effect of these small images on the people here and there who have seen them is strange. Those foreign to art see them as jests, jokes, or grimaces, others leaf through them thoughtlessly, as if they were playing cards, and still other sensitive people look and look sitting before individual ones, unable to break away.” – Emil Nolde