AMONG TROLLS AND MONSTERS

ARTISTS' politics have often been a grey area, and perhaps are better left in that greyness, since otherwise they tend to produce wrong emphases and even distortions. Some artists have been political opportunists, others have simply been naive, while others again have wavered awkwardly between the two extremes. W.B. Yeats is still occasionally described as having leanings towards fascism and modern Israel has not forgiven Wagner his anti Semitism, though it is largely forgotten that Rod in, Cezanne, Renoir and many more were anti Dreyfusards.

In the case of Emil Nolde, the German Expressionist artist, a retrospective of whose work has just ended at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, the greyness is decidedly opaque. He was, it now seems, a member of the Nazi Party in north Schleswig in the mid 1930s, though not entirely a voluntary one in 1934 he had joined a Nazi inspired local co operative which a year later was subsumed into the NSDAP proper, without any move on his part. Nolde (born Emil Hansen) was then in his late 60s, with a strong following which regarded him as the most German and "Nordic" among the nation's advanced painters - rather as if he had been Germany's Jack Yeats. Goebbels, who had some genuine taste in visual art, was for a while one of his influential admirers.

Within a few years, the political situation changed entirely. Goebbels, reading the signs of the times, backtracked and began to plan the massive Nazi confiscations and even burnings of works by modern artists, in which Nolde himself suffered heavily. In fact, he seems to have suffered worse in terms of numbers than any other German modernist, since over 1,000 of his works - oils, watercolours, drawings, etchings were confiscated from public and private collections. Finally, in 1941, he was excluded from the Reich Chamber of Visual Arts and forbidden to paint or engage in any professional activity.

Nolde and his Danish wife Ada survived the war, though she died in 1946 with her health undermined; he lived on until 1956 and even married again, to a woman less than a third of his own age. What is most relevant, however, is that Nolde managed to paint on, in virtual isolation, through the dark years of the war and in spite of his official, and much dreaded, Malverbot. He could not easily work in oils, which would arouse suspicion and leave traces or telltale smells, so he painted small watercolours over 1,000 of them working in a room at the top of his house, from where he could spy any approaching patrols or intruders over the wide, flat, north German landscape.

Today Nolde's home at Seebull is a museum of his work and a place of pilgrimage to art lovers (works which he stored in a Berlin studio were destroyed by wartime bombing, a recurrent story with German artists of the time). This was his native region, an area fought and argued over by Germany and Denmark for centuries until, after the Versailles Treaty, it was divided between them and Nolde almost overnight found that he now lived in Danish territory and so was technically a Danish subject. In 1926 he moved back just over the border into Germany and built the house at Seebull to his own design, horrified by what the Danes were doing with modern drainage methods to his old homeland with its dykes and polders. It was to be his home for the rest of his life, and, the area appears again and again in his pictures.

This needs to be emphasised, because Nolde was a very regional artist with a peasant background and ancestry. He travelled a good deal and even made a trip to the South Seas in 1913 as part of a German ethnographic expedition, visiting China and Japan on the way and barely escaping arrest by the British as he and his wife returned via Egypt in the summer of 1914 - the Great War had just broken out. Yet there was something incurably insular, almost provincial about him, and his cultural roots and mentality were strongly ethnic racial; he hated the dominance of French taste in German art circles of the Wilhelminian era, and sometimes, by reaction, went out of the way to stress his own German-ness.

ARTISTIC nationalism, of course, was common place at the time in almost all European countries, and our own Literary Revival is only one example of many. More often than not it carried no detailed political or ideological programme, but today Political Correctness tends to equate it with fascism, and Nolde's brief flirtation with Nazism has often been held against him. In fact, in the early days of the Weimar Republic he had been involved in left wing artists' groups, but Nolde had little real political awareness and was, by temperament, a lone wolf. He found it hard to get along with groups of any kind for long; early in the century he had been thrown out of the Berlin Secession after an unseemly quarrel and his contacts later with the Brucke group of Expressionists in Dresden and Berlin did not last more than a few years.

And a lone wolf he remains, in every sense. It has become almost ritualistic to include him among the German Expressionists, but he was much older than most of them and belongs to the generation of Barlach and Kathe Kollwitz.

Nolde was really a kind of belated Symbolist, whose closest affinities are with Redon, Bocklin, Munch and Ensor - even if he sometimes speaks with an oldfashioned local accent. Also, he is a "Nordic", north European artist rather than a specifically German one. He grew up where Germanic and Scandinavian cultures merge, he had a Danish wife and spoke the language fluently himself, spent some of his formative years in Copenhagen and knew Scandinavian literature well, especially the novels of Jens Peter Jacobsen (much admired by Rilke).

The troll like creatures and monsters who inhabit his work belong as much to the Norse sagas as to north German mythology and folklore. As for his religious pictures, they came mainly out of his early readings of the Bible, and personally I find many or most of them lurid and overstated, with a heavy, dank flavour of the Sunday painter and the lay preacher about them. The truth must be faced that Nolde is/was a terribly uneven artist, lacking real taste or self criticism, a man for whom the sublime and the banal were only a step apart. In general, the watercolours are finer, more sensitive and more luminous than the oil paintings, and the graphic work, though hit and miss, shows how powerfully his imagination functioned in stark black and white.

ALLOWING for this, there are a dozen or so oil paintings in the London exhibition which rank with the very greatest of the century. Nolde was rarely comfortable with the human figure - I suspect it did not interest him greatly - and the still life pictures rarely succeed as compositions. The densely colourful (and nowadays hugely popular) flower paintings, based on the garden he and Ada created in their low lying North Sea home, are best appreciated if you do not see too many of, them at once. Where Nolde is unique and unapproachable is in his response to his native region, and above all to the sea, which he knew, loved and feared from childhood to old age. Wedged between the North Sea and the Baltic, Schleswig Holsteiners cannot easily escape the influence of either, or both.

Tugboat on the Elbe, painted in 1910 during a sojourn in Hamburg, sets the heavy, sooty coils of black from the tug's smokestack against an extraordinary yellow sea and sky. Sea in the Evening (1919) shows that Nolde could have been an excellent Abstractionist, had he bothered. There are angry seas which loom up threateningly almost to the picture frame, calm, idyllic blue ones, and a wonderful late painting called Bright Sea in which two small sailboats glide side by side (a reference to Ada's death?) on a soft violet blue swell which a thick yellow mist is gradually blotting out.

Of the landscapes, the much reproduced Close Evening is a marvel of original colour orchestration, built around an orange-red farmhouse and cloud, a foreground of green, and a clump of large purple flowers looming to the right. The watercolour entitled Evening Landscape, North Friesland shows a broad, flat, treeless field stretching away to a purpleblack horizon overhung with reddish clouds, making a mood picture equivalent to the finest poetry.

In works such as these, Nolde's pantheistic imagination works side by side with factual observation, and those who know the north German coastline will realise how surprisingly close he often is to the blue of the polders, the yellow of the rape fields, the harsh green of the grasslands, the low built farms huddling against wind and weather. And, above all, to the great overhanging skies, whose changing cloud formations can alternately shape and dissolve monsters, animals and sinister shapes beyond even Nolde's power to imagine or create.