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Emil Nolde, "Young Couple," 1913

To learn about other great moments in modern art, take our online course, Modern Art, 1880-1945 or Pigment to Pixel: Color in Modern and Contemporary Art.. Created by The Museum of Modern Art.

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  • piceratops ultimate style avatar for user Dayvyd
    What is this music in the background? Sounds very much like Satie...
    (6 votes)
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  • cacteye yellow style avatar for user Karlar
    Can someone please tell me why the man's face looks so evil? Maybe there is someone who works there with a Khan account who could tell me?
    (3 votes)
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  • piceratops ultimate style avatar for user Dayvyd
    What is supposed to be the relevance of the varying color? Is each colored piece considered to be separate from the others?
    (3 votes)
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    • leafers ultimate style avatar for user Danielle Koch
      Since there were 112 prints (I believe that was the number) it makes sense that they would be separated and not intended to be considered as a group. However, the speakers did mention that Nolde was experimenting with the different colors. Maybe one shade of blue heightened the sense of ambiguity, while a slightly different shade made the couple seem more distant from the viewer. He was really just trying a bunch of things. From what I understand, the artist worked in watercolors a lot and watercolors can be a less-than-predictable medium, thus requiring experimenting of this sort.
      (3 votes)
  • piceratops seedling style avatar for user Lexi Endres
    what was the point of making 3 of the same paintings but in different colors?
    (1 vote)
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  • mr pants teal style avatar for user Cyrus Parson
    What other lithographs would be considered/would you consider notable and important to be aware of or study? I have come to recognize a striking diversity amongst this method of printing.
    (2 votes)
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  • leaf blue style avatar for user Olivia S
    It's interesting how the color can reflect the feeling of the picture
    (3 votes)
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  • sneak peak green style avatar for user Ryan Nee
    I didn't realize that there were printmakers from the Expressionist period.. Were there other Expressionist printmakers other than Emil Nolde? Was there any relationship between German expressionist printmaking and the printmaking in France a few decades earlier by Toulouse-Lautrec?
    (1 vote)
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    • leafers ultimate style avatar for user Janeite
      Printmaking is one of the oldest methods of mark making. Making woodblock carvings and printing them were a common way to illustrate books made with printing presses. Before modern printing presses, all images in books were added in with lithography, a kind of printmaking. If you ever read older books the illustrations, especially colored ones, are in thicker pages in the middle of the book as opposed to spread throughout. That's because they couldn't be printed into the text, but were separate processes. Printmaking is both a craft and an art, and for this reason it has long been looked down on by the art world for its reproductive qualities and its commercial abilities. However, it is an art, and many collectors of rare books often consider the printed illustrations to be of more value than the texts. Printmakers commonly share images and presses together because it lends itself so well to trading prints and workspaces. You can't really make more than one painting or sculpture, but it's very common to make a series, or a run, of prints and then to share them with other printmakers. Also, they usually shared technical details of their work and innovations in the field. For another Expressionist printmaker I highly recommend Egon Schiele.
      (I'm a printmaker myself, can you tell?)
      (3 votes)
  • aqualine sapling style avatar for user soumyadeepdas
    how did he made three exactly same pictures but with different colours
    (1 vote)
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  • leaf green style avatar for user Rachel Coleman
    The red print gives off a feeling of love and romance, the green print gives off a feeling of jealously and distrust, but what would the green and blue print symbolize?
    (1 vote)
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  • blobby green style avatar for user Renae  Gray
    It's beautiful how all three Variations of the same painting in different colors could represent three totally different meanings. Color is very important when expressing art and developing a meaning and an interpretation of what the artist envisioned. What were the three specific meanings Nolde expressed in each painting?
    (1 vote)
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Video transcript

- This is "Young Couple," a lithograph from 1913 by Emil Nolde. Nolde is known as one of the leading expressionists, a loose group of artists working mostly in Germany in the early 1900s and 1910s. They worked to heighten the emotional, expressive impact of their subjects by distorting the forms or exaggerating the color. Nolde's subject here is the relationship between the sexes, and this was a theme throughout his work. He was looking for themes that would get to the core of human existence. It's interesting when you look at the two figures what you see, there's a certain ambiguity in their relationship. The man is grabbing the woman by the wrist, and she sort of recoils almost, so we're not sure if she's actually really afraid of him, there's some kind of threatening or dangerous situation there, or if it's just a coy little game that they're playing. But what we have here are three variations of the same lithograph. A lithograph is made by drawing on a stone and then being printed. Nolde worked in a commercial print shop, so it was a shop that didn't really work with artists. He got very, very experimental. Instead of just having the edition of 112, he would change the colors in each print. Within this edition of 112, there's actually 68 different color variations, and we're very lucky here at MoMA that we have three of those because what it shows you is how he used the color, he experimented with it, each time to create a different emotional reading. By 1913, many of the expressionists like Nolde were creating their most powerful, very important works. And then of course just a year later in 1914, the war broke out in Germany. If the relationships changed, the subjects changed, and the mood, which was often somewhat exuberant in the early years of expressionism changed quite a bit after this moment.