Summary Late nineteenth century thinking was inclined to biological explanations. That art was created by artists was not a triviality. The work of art was the output of an outstanding personality, different from the rest of mankind. The style of the single work of art as the style of a movement was understood as expression of the single artistic personality or a group of artistic personalities. The concept of the “Zeitgeist” was to a degree replaced by the belief in the psychological, emotional and moral entity of an ethnic group. The Nordic man was the creator of a Nordic civilisation and a Nordic art. The creations of this Nordic man were the mirror or the materialisation of a Nordic mentality, the Nordic genius. The odd and puzzling side of this view of the world was that the Nordic man crystallized in two very different kinds of personalities. One is the “Hamlet'‐figure. A person troubled by doubts, an intelligent dreamer, always doubting his impulses, especially his own ability to solve any problem. The other is the “blond beast”. A man who acts without thinking, a mercenary leader, a “Tarzan”. The man of will, who follows his own interests, his need for power and glory over the dead body of his enemy or any passive bystander. Whereas the intelligent and sensitive “Hamlet” leaves behind ultimate destruction, the “blond beast” is aman, who cures the diseases of civilisation and is the builder of new worlds. In Denmark we meet “Hamlet” in the writings of Herman Bang and J.P. Jacobsen, and the “blond beast” in the novels of Johannes V. Jensen. All had an impact on German intellectual life. Figure painters as Böcklin, Hodler, Fidus (Hugo Höppener) and Agnes Slott M⊘ller ("Niels Ebbesen") embody the man of action as plain brutal, as we know it from the latest Hollywood movies. German landscape painters explored the lyric, sensitive Nordic nature of man in images of flat, misty, unpicturesque landscapes. By doing this they had a choice between three important traditions in European landscape art. The classical Italian landscape, which had a great impact on early and mid nineteenth century German painting was discharged. The new analytical French landscape was (for a moment) put aside. The Nordic concept of a landscape as an image of a state of mind became the leading theme. The Dutch painters, the romantic English painters and some younger Scandinavian painters became ideals. German artists settled in Dachau and Worpswede as a parallel to the Skagen School. The German expressionists in the beginning of the twentieth century were sceptical about the dreamy world of the turn of the century. French, Russian and primitive art came as a revelation in the search for the real roots. Der blaue Reiter in Munich and Der Sturm in Berlin joined the modernistic movement in a way, that was soon to be criticised by the conservatives for not being German and degenerate. A leading expressionist, namely Emil Nolde, remains true to the Nordic inclination. Born in Schleswig, an old Danish territory, he travelled to Copenhagen in 1900–1901, studied Danish painters and tried to make a break through in the Danish art world. In this he failed, but he retained his Danish relations, living in the borderland between Germany and Denmark and showing his works in Berlin. In Noldes later paintings there is a mixture of the “new savage painting”, exoticism and Nordic mysticism. The landscape motives from the flat fields and the coasts of western Schleswig have a similarity to the landscapes around 1900 by L. A. Ring. The relations between Nolde and Danish landscape painters is of a kind, that matches the relations between the landscapes of Edvard Munch and Karl Schmidt‐Rottluff.
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Nov 1, 1996
Joseph Silk 
Open Access