Nolde Foundation Seebüll

The museum, in August 2012

The Seebüll Ada and Emil Nolde Foundation is a foundation established in 1956. It is the sponsor of an art museum in Seebüll in Schleswig-Holstein . It shows works by the German painter Emil Nolde (1867–1956). The museum was opened in 1957, after Nolde's death, by the Seebüll Ada and Emil Nolde Foundation.

history

The married couple Ada and Emil Nolde acquired the vacant terp in 1926 and had a brick house built there, which was modeled on the Bauhaus architecture and thus consciously stood out from the surrounding Frisian houses. From 1930 the Noldes lived in the house. Further buildings and a garden based on Nolde's designs were subsequently created. After Emil Nolde's death in 1956, the house was turned into a museum. In 1996 the house and garden were placed under monument protection. In 2010 around 80,000 people visited the museum.

building

The Noldes' house at Seebüll 31 is a two-story cube with single-storey extensions with a triangular floor plan. It was built according to Nolde's ideas between 1927 and 1928 with the help of his friend, architect Georg Rieve, as a studio and residential building and was expanded from 1934–37 with a picture room. In the flat roof are skylights . Today the former studio on the ground floor is part of the exhibition area and contains a picture room. A few years after Nolde's death, five buildings, which in comparison to the Nolde House, looked rather crude-looking, were erected on the site to cover the increasing space requirements of the foundation. These structurally unsatisfactory and technically inadequate buildings were demolished as part of the reorganization of the entire area that began in 2004. In their place, two architecturally sophisticated new buildings were built in the following years to the southwest of the studio house according to plans by the architects around Walter Rolfes commissioned by the foundation : the forum and the office. Among other things, testimonies from Nolde's life are exhibited in the forum; there is also a café and a museum shop. The office is the seat of the foundation with the Nolde-Werke depot, library, offices and director's apartment. The third new building was a one-storey building, which serves as a greenhouse and in the front area offers the public plants and seeds from our own cultivation.

garden

The garden in spring

The garden is an individual garden work of art that Nolde designed himself and that takes up the contemporary reform movement, which was directed against industrial and standardized art forms. This resulted in a fairly closed, home -related cottage garden in terms of planting and equipment , even if this does not have a central axis related to the house, which is typical for these gardens, and house and garden form separate units. The paths in the central part form the letters A and E for Ada and Emil. The garden includes the thatched summer house, which Nolde called Seebüllchen , a pond and the burial place of Ada and Emil Noldes. On the front wall of the crypt there is Nolde's mosaic Madonna and Child. Nolde's gardener Thomas Börnsen looked after the garden until 1976. He left behind a planting plan that has made it possible to maintain and maintain the garden in the sense of Nolde to this day.

Collection and events

The collection consists predominantly of works by Emil Nolde, especially paintings and watercolors , from all phases of his career. Nolde himself also collected works by other artists. Every year, part of the collection is exhibited with one focus, for example Emil Nolde in 2013 : Colors were lucky for me. The works are arranged thematically; Religiously inspired images are shown in the former studio, including the permanent nine-part altar work The Life of Christ from 1911/12. Some of the former living quarters of the Noldes have been preserved in their original condition. Other events take place in the museum, such as chamber music performances and a painting school. It is open from around the beginning of March to the end of November, depending on the location of the weekends.