Born of a peasant family, the youthful Nolde made his living as a wood-carver. He was able to study art formally only when some of his early works were reproduced and sold as postcards.

In Paris Nolde began to paint works that bear a superficial affinity to Impressionistic painting. In 1906 he was invited to join Die Brücke, an association of Dresden-based Expressionist artists who admired his "storm of colour." But Nolde, a solitary and intuitive painter, dissociated himself from that tightly knit group after a year and a half.

Fervently religious and racked by a sense of sin, Nolde created such works as Dance Around the Golden Calf (see below) in which the erotic frenzy of the figures and the demonic, masklike faces are rendered with deliberately crude draftsmanship and dissonant colours.

During 1913 and 1914 Nolde was a member of an ethnological expedition that reached the East Indies. There he was impressed with the power of unsophisticated belief, as is evident in his lithograph Dance (see below).

Back in Europe, Nolde led a reclusive life on the Baltic coast of Germany. He was a prolific graphic artist especially noted for the stark black and white effects employed in his crudely incised woodcuts.

In the late 30s when the Nazis came to power, they declared his work "decadent" and forbade him to paint, even though Nolte had supported the rise of the Nazi movement.

After World War II he resumed painting but often merely reworked older themes.