The man who gave the mountains a face
Emil Nolde had a life-long fascination with the Swiss Alps, immortalising his love of the mountains in many humorous works.
Katrin Brunner
Katrin Brunner is a self-employed journalist specialising in history and chronicler of Niederweningen.
From then on, the German was often to be found around St. Gallen with his paints and easel. But what he liked even better was hiking in the nearby Alpstein and all over the Swiss Alps. As a member of the SAC (Swiss Alpine Club), he scaled the Matterhorn, the Jungfrau and the summit of the Monte Rosa. And the mountains’ names such as Schreckhorn (literally peak of fear), Churfirsten (ridges of Chur), Jungfrau (virgin) and Mönch (monk) gave the young man’s imagination plenty to work with.
Not cut out for teaching
The painter, who spent nearly every free moment in the mountains, then started painting the most famous Alpine peaks with funny, human faces. He spent the summer of 1894 in the Lötschental, where he produced a whole series of Expressionist mountain postcards: the Berggesichter (the faces of the mountains). It was a completely new way of depicting the mountains and valleys. More out of curiosity than anything, in 1896 Emil Hansen sent two of his pictures to the publisher of the magazine Jugend, where the quirky mountain portraits were an instant hit. The unusual and witty motifs were also very popular with paying customers. In the end, there were around 30 different postcard designs.
Hansen was evidently a driven person. Around the turn of the 20th century, he left Switzerland to return to Germany. And in 1902 he changed his name from Hans Emil Hansen to Emil Nolde. Whether this name change was intended to pay homage to his home town, or was simply to rid himself of the common name Hansen, has never been fully understood. That same year he married the actress Adamine (‘Ada’) Vilstrup.
In the summer of 1941, Emil Nolde received a letter from Adolf Ziegler, president of the Reich Chamber of Visual Arts, expressly banning him from painting. Ziegler wrote: “... you are still completely misaligned with this cultural ideology and still fail to meet the requirements to practise artistic activities in the Reich and that are therefore necessary to be a member of my Chamber.”
In 1946 Adamine Vilstrup died of heart failure. Two years later, Emil Nolde married 26-year-old Jolanthe Erdmann. The couple visited Switzerland on their honeymoon in 1948. But that was to be the last time, as the man who gave the mountains a face died in April 1956 at his home in the north German town of Seebüll.
Nolde's mountain faces were inspirational and were copied by numerous contemporaries, as these two postcards show. Swiss National Museum
