Art: German Expressionist

In the 1890s, when Pablo Picasso was a pup, a Schleswig-German artist named Emil Nolde began experimenting. He distorted forms, rearranged figures, changed colors—innovations with which Picasso was later credited by the uninformed. Artist Nolde, father of German "Expressionism," lived through World War I, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich. When in 1937 the Nazis held a finger-pointing exhibit of "Degenerate Art" in Munich, Nolde was naturally included.

Last week Chicago's Katherine Kuh Galleries held a one-man Nolde show. The pictures, all water colors, covered Nolde's work from 1914 to 1930. Although some of them—two parakeets, a sheaf of poppy blossoms—were untypically...