Gustav Schiefler 1915

Emil Nolde's portrait of Gustav Schiefler is a marvel of thick oil paint, worked and worried to create this really strange but dignified man. You can see how Nolde has used dark greens, blues, and blacks, building up a textured surface that feels both luminous and somber. Then he throws a curveball, right? That crazy lavender face and that green mustache, like something out of a fairytale! He’s captured not just a likeness, but a feeling, an attitude. I wonder if Nolde and Schiefler were good friends, or if they just hung out that one time. I bet Nolde was thinking about Van Gogh’s portraits when he made this; that same intensity, that same desire to get under the skin of the sitter. You can almost see Nolde wrestling with the paint, trying to pin down something elusive, something real. Like he’s thinking ‘I’ll get you’. The history of painting is this long, ongoing conversation between artists, each one riffing off the others, throwing in their own two cents. It's never ending.