Productions are now possible that are zero, without being bad. Zero because they have no content; not bad because a general form of good patterns is envisioned by the authors. With these words, Goethe depicted the image of poetry in his time a hundred years ago; with the same words, one could describe the developmental stage at which German visual art had reached the full maturity of the impressionist style around the turn of the last century. Instead of decisively flowing forward, the currents of the art movement began to spread out in a flattening manner. Unintentionally, indeed without even realizing it, Emil Nolde has become a renewer of German painting at this significant moment. In his hands still lies the fate of German art in this deeply agitated era of transformation.