Kosakenadel

During the autumn of 1913, Emil Nolde left his Berlin home to embark on the voyage of a lifetime to the South Pacific. He and his wife Ada were to be part of a ‘Medical-Demographic’ expedition under the leadership of Professor Alfred Leber and Gertrud Arnthal. The group’s final destination was to be the territory that was then known as German New Guinea, but in order to reach the East, the group would first have to make their way though Russia, travelling via the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Russia was unlike anything Nolde had experienced. He later wrote in his autobiography, Mein Leben, of the ‘beautiful things’ they experienced in Moscow: the Kremlin, old palaces, and Russian churches – though he found it disappointing how obvious it was that the city had been ‘quickly and badly rebuilt’ following the 1812 fire. As the train carried Nolde and his companions deeper into Russia, Nolde would take advantage of any breaks at stations to leave and explore a little, which allowed him the opportunity to observe and sketch the Russian people first hand.

The stations and their waiting rooms were virtually his only form of contact with the local population, as none of the expedition group spoke Russian – although in Moscow they had as their guide a Russian student who spoke German by virtue of his studies there, and had also enjoyed the hospitality of a German-Russian family who had a penchant for serving caviar. The conditions of the waiting rooms were close to unbearable, with an air that was ‘hazy and thick enough to cut with a knife’. Nolde was however, so engrossed by his drawing and the different characters he encountered, that he had to be careful not to be left behind, ‘so he wasn’t sat drawing indefinitely in Siberia’.

Later, upon his return to Europe, Nolde would create a series of four oil paintings commemorating his time in Russia, drawing on these sketches as not only visual aide-mémoires, but also to evoke the intensity of his remembered feelings in the representation of these figures in this work. Nolde cleverly emphasizes their piercing stares and serious expressions by contrasting their faces and attire it against a predominantly dark background, which itself evokes the low heavy clouds and dark skies of the Siberian autumn that Nolde describes in Mein Leben. Using deliberately bold and simplified forms for their features, the pervasive sense of fixity is further emphasized by the extremes of the stark alternating contrast of the black and white furs the figures wear. At the same time, the forceful colours and the thick, bold manner in which everything has been painted, have also been used to heighten the prevailing mood of this work being a kind of crystallized and totemic image somehow resonating within Nolde's memory of his time spent amongst the people of Russia.