When he was rejected by the Munich Academy of Fine Arts in 1898, he spent the next three years taking private painting classes, visiting Paris, and becoming familiar with the contemporary impressionist scene that was popular at this time.
He married Danish actress Ada Vilstrup in 1902, and moved to Berlin, where he would meet collector Gustav Schiefler and artist Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, both of whom would advocate his work later in life.
[4] In Berlin, Nolde was strongly influenced by the collections of the Völkerkundemuseum in what was then Königgrätzer Straße, which he visited repeatedly and where he made over 120 drawings of exhibits from the Global South.
His studies resulted in works such as Man, Woman and Cat (1912), in which Nolde depicted King Njoya's throne “Mandu Yenu”, which came to Germany from Cameroon under controversial circumstances, only slightly altered.
[5] He exhibited with Wassily Kandinsky's Munich-based group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in 1912; by this time he had achieved some fame, and was able to support himself through his art.
However, Adolf Hitler rejected all forms of modernism as "degenerate art"; the Nazi regime officially condemned Nolde's work.
[11][12] While acknowledging his success as a brilliant colourist, greater awareness of Nolde's commitment to Nazism and a discussion of the relationship between his politics, denunciation of non-Jewish adversaries as Jews, and his art is considered in more recent scholarship.
A famous series of paintings covers the German New Guinea Expedition, visiting the South Seas, Moscow, Siberia, Korea, Japan, and China.
[15][16] Nolde, who grew up a farmer's son in a small, religious community near the German-Danish border, was left with lasting impressions of Judeo-Christian stories after reading the Bible in its entirety.
[17][16] In his early religious works (1900–1904), he was unable to solidify his own style and distinguish himself from several role models, Jean-François Millet and Honoré Daumier.
[16] Nolde experienced a turning point in 1906; in that year, he shifted from an impressionistic style to a depiction of religious themes that emphasized the emotion of the moment, use of bright colors and only two dimensions of representation.
[21] Nolde's work has become the focus of renewed attention after a painting entitled Blumengarten (Utenwarf)[22] from 1917, which now hangs in the art museum Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden, and has been valued at US$4 million, was discovered to have been looted from Otto Nathan Deutsch, a German-Jewish refugee whose heirs, including a Holocaust survivor, are asking for its return.
[26][27] In 2017 the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum Foundation restituted the painting “Women in a Flower Garden” by Emil Nolde to the heirs of Eduard Müller who was murdered in a Nazi concentration camp in 1942.
[29] In 2000 the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum Foundation, Duisburg rejected a restitution request from the family of the Breslau (Wroclaw) collector Dr. Ismar Littmann for Nolde's painting Buchsbaumgarten (Boxtree Garden).