Art & Creativity Quote by Emil Nolde

Nolde is selling a seductive myth: the painter as a kind of weather system, producing art the way lungs produce air. It’s a line that flatters both the artist and the audience. If painting is as natural as breathing, then the work arrives pre-certified as authentic, uncorrupted by theory, schools, or the fussy gatekeeping of “knowing very much.” That posture mattered in early 20th-century European modernism, where Expressionists like Nolde positioned themselves against academic polish and bourgeois “good taste.” Instinct becomes a weapon: not just a method, but a moral claim.

The subtext is also defensive. By downgrading knowledge, Nolde protects the messy, high-risk decisions his kind of painting demands: exaggerated color, blunt form, emotional distortion. If a canvas looks raw, even crude, the rhetoric reframes it as purity rather than incompetence. “Instinctively” functions as a shield against critique; it implies that analysis would miss the point because the point is bodily, immediate, unmediated.

But the line has a second edge. “Need not know very much” doesn’t mean know nothing. It’s an argument against overdetermination, not against craft. Breathing and walking are “natural,” yet they’re also trained, conditioned, shaped by habit and environment. Nolde’s ideal artist has internalized technique so thoroughly that it disappears, leaving only the impression of spontaneity. That’s why the sentence works: it turns discipline into invisibility, and invisibility into virtue.