  About the Artwork
  
  
  Emil Nolde painted flowers as metaphors for basic human emotions and the cycle of life. At Seebull, where he lived from 1927, he cultivated a garden that became a source of inspiration. An admirer of Vincent van Gogh, Nolde adopted the motif of sunflowers in a series of works. Here, he sets vibrantly orange and yellow petals against a dark blue sky. The ripe blooms bend heavily toward the earth to start the life cycle anew.

Germany's totalitarian National Socialist (Nazi) government censored the use of emotive color and vigorous brushwork in modern art, but there were factions in the Nazi party supportive of Nolde's work. This painting was shown to Adolf Hitler in 1933 at a private Munich home in an unusual plan devised to promote Nolde. Ultimately, the plan failed, and even though Nolde was a member of the Nazi party, Sunflowers was confiscated from the Berlin National Gallery in 1937 and displayed in a propaganda exhibition that condemned modern art as "degenerate" and morally corrupt.
  
  
  Title
  Sunflowers
  
  
  Artwork Date
  1932
  
  Artist
  Emil Nolde
  
  
  
  Life Dates
  1867-1956
  
  
  
  
  Nationality
  
  
  
  Please note:
  Definitions for nationality may vary significantly, depending on chronology and world events.
  Some definitions include:
  Belonging to a people having a common origin based on a geography and/or descent and/or tradition and/or culture and/or religion and/or language, or sharing membership in a legally defined nation.
  
  
  
  German
  
  
  
  Culture
  
  
  
  Please note:
  Cultures may be defined by the language, customs, religious beliefs, social norms, and material traits of a group.
  
  
  
  
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  Medium
  Oil on canvas
  
  
  Dimensions
  Unframed: 29 × 35 inches (73.7 × 88.9 cm)
  Framed: 35 1/2 × 41 3/4 × 3 inches (90.2 × 106 × 7.6 cm)
  
  
  Classification
  Paintings
  
  
  Department
  European Modern Art to 1970
  
  
  Credit
  Gift of Robert H. Tannahill
  
  
  
  Accession Number
  
  
  
  This unique number is assigned to an individual artwork as part of the cataloguing process at the time of entry into the permanent collection.
  Most frequently, accession numbers begin with the year in which the artwork entered the museum’s holdings.
  For example, 2008.3 refers to the year of acquisition and notes that it was the 3rd of that year. The DIA has a few additional systems—no longer assigned—that identify specific donors or museum patronage groups.
  
  
  
  54.460
  
  
  Copyright
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