Faith & Spirit Quote by Emil Nolde

A painter’s provocation dressed up as a timeless truth: Nolde elevates art by stepping on the graves of dead gods. The jab at Assyrians, Egyptians, and Greeks isn’t really about ancient history; it’s a framing device meant to make art look like the only human product that outlives belief systems. By choosing religions no one “these days” practices, he rigs the experiment. Of course their faiths seem obsolete from a modern European vantage point. The flex is that their art still circulates in museums, textbooks, and the cultural imagination, conveniently detached from the messy lives and power structures that produced it.

The rhetoric is pure hierarchy: “exalted,” “proud,” “rising above all time.” It turns aesthetic value into a kind of secular salvation. But the tell is the qualifier: “whenever it was beautiful.” Nolde isn’t defending art as record, ritual, or social practice; he’s defending beauty as a sorting mechanism that decides what deserves immortality. That’s not neutral. It’s a modernist credo that flatters the artist (and the gatekeepers) as arbiters of what counts.

Context sharpens the edge. Nolde was a German Expressionist who lived through the nationalist storms of the early 20th century, and his own career was tangled in the era’s racial and political obsessions. So the line “above religion and race” reads less like a pacifist ideal than a strategic laundering: let art float free of the very identities and ideologies that so often weaponize it. The subtext is a bid for purity - and for permanence - in a century that made permanence feel impossible.