The artists as explorers: the Expressionist artists Kirchner and Nolde studied non-Western lifestyles and incorporated them into their artistic projects. Between "armchair anthropology" practised in the museums and "field-work anthropology", which also took place in the colonies, both artists contributed to the construction of an (imagined) "other", offering an alternative to bourgeois, "civilised" society in Germany. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde both spent time between 1910-11 studying objects and materials in ethnographic museums, but before long they expanded their investigations to include travels to colonial regions (Nolde) and the staging of "exotic" studio environments (Kirchner). The publication examines how both approaches evolved through an interplay between art, early German anthropology and colonial enterprise within the German Empire at the beginning of the 20th century. It contains not only paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, posters and documents, but also a variety of texts offering a broad overview as well as relating a specific narrative.

Volume covers the Collection of Prints and Illustrated Books, not the collection of artists' books.

Primitivism versus modernity: the expressionist dilemma - Politics of primitivism - Brucke bathers: back to nature - Max Pechstein's visionary ideas - Emil Nolded.

An introduction to the German Expressionist painter, graphic artist and sculptor who, at the turn of the 19th century, was Germany's most influential artist.

Over 100 works by Beckmann, Feininger, Kirchner, Kollwitz, Nolde, Marc, and others. Distorted, stylized forms embody revolutionary mood of the early 20th century. Introduction. Captions. Notes on artists.

Emil Nolde (1867-1956) was one of the greatest colourists of the twentieth century. An artist passionate about his north German home near the Danish border, with its immense skies, flat, windswept landscapes and storm-tossed seas, he was equally fascinated by the demi-monde of Berlin's cafes and cabarets, the busy to and fro of tugboats in the port of Hamburg and the myriad of peoples and places he saw on his trip to the South Seas in 1914. Nolde felt strongly about what he painted, identifying with his subjects in every brushstroke he made, heightening his colours and simplifying his shapes, so that we, the viewers, can also experience his emotional response to the world about him. This book features five essays and over 100 illustrations drawn from the incomparable collection of the Emil Nolde Foundation in Seebull (the artist's former home in north Germany). It covers Nolde's complete career, from his early atmospheric paintings of his homeland right through to the intensely coloured, so-called 'unpainted paintings', works done on small pieces of paper during the Third Reich when Nolde was branded 'degenerate' and forbidden to work as an artist. Exhibition: National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, Ireland (14.02. - 10.06.2018) / Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Scotland (14.07.-21.10.2018).