Red-Haired Girl

Modern Art

1919

Emil Nolde
German, 1867–1956

When Emil Nolde painted Red-Haired Girl, a closely cropped figure depicted with palpable emotion and fiery color, he was already widely acknowledged as a leading Expressionist artist. One year later, he joined the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party, which eventually denounced paintings in this style.

Red-Haired Girl, along with hundreds of other works by Nolde, was confiscated by the Nazis in 1937 and displayed as an example of “degenerate art” in the infamous Entartete Kunst exhibition, which ridiculed modern art as morally corrupt and celebrated the party’s systemic attacks on artists. Despite the denunciation of his work, Nolde maintained his affiliation with the Nazis throughout the war. While Max Beckmann and Marc Chagall, whose works are on view on adjacent walls, were forced to defect from Europe and Otto Dix was arrested as an “unreliable intellectual” for his anti-fascist protests, Nolde remained aligned with the Nazis. He sought their approval and embraced their ideology while also arguing that paintings like this were “vigorous, durable, and ardent.”

Status: Currently Off View
Department: Modern Art

Artist: Emil Nolde
Title: Red-Haired Girl
Place: Germany (Artist's nationality:)
Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.: 1919
Medium: Oil on canvas
Inscriptions: Signed, l.r.: "Emil Nolde."
Dimensions: 65.4 × 40 cm (25 3/4 × 15 3/4 in.)
Credit Line: Bequest of Mr. and Mrs. George H. Tagge
Reference Number: 2002.589

Victor Curt Habicht, Der Neidersächsische Kunstkreis (Hannover, 1930), p. 327 (ill.), fig. 173.
Provinzial-Museum Hannover, Katalog der Kunstsammlungen im Provinzial Museum zu Hannover (Berlin, 1930), vol. 1, pp. 276–7, no. 439.
Museum der Gegenwart: Zeitschrift der Deutschen Museen für neuere Kunst 2, (Berlin, 1931–2), p. 86.
Martin Urban, Emil Nolde, Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings (Hagerstown, 1990), vol. 2, no. 836, pp. 17, 193 (ill.), 619.

Munich, Archäologisches Institut, Entartete Kunst, July 19–November 30, 1937, no. 16012, as Mädchenkopf; traveled throughout Germany and Austria 1937–1941.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, February 17–May 12, 1991; traveled to Art Institute of Chicago, June 22–September 8, 1991, pp. 58, (ill.), 59 (ill.), p. 322 (ill), fig. 343.

Provinzialmuseum, Hannover, 1924–1937; confiscated by German government in “Degenerate Art” campaign, 1937. On consignment to Bernhard A. Boehmer, Güstrow, Germany, 1941. Dr. Lawrence K. Taylor, Miami, 1947–c. 1971 [Urban 1990]; by descent to his mother, Beatrice Buford Taylor, Miami, c. 1971; by descent to her daughter and son-in-law, George and Yvonne Tagge, Chicago and Carefree, Ariz., c. 1972–2002; given to Art Institute, 2002.

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