Art: The Music of Color

For German Expressionist Emil Nolde, colors had a life of their own: "Weeping and laughing, hot and holy, like love songs and eroticism, like chants and magnificent chorales. Vibrating, they peal like silver bells and clang like bronze bells, proclaiming happiness, passion and love, soul, blood and death." The "sweetness, often sugariness" of Renoir and Monet was not to his harsher taste, and he complained bitterly in the years before World War II that "their art, because it meets popular taste, is elected darling of the world."

Today popular taste is fast catching up to the harsh bite and passion of Germany's...

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