Emil Nolde's Dance Around the Golden Calf, painted in 1910 and now in the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, is one of the most viscerally powerful treatments of the Exodus idolatry narrative in 20th-century art, an Expressionist vision that collapses the distinction between pagan ecstasy and religious frenzy in a explosion of color that is simultaneously beautiful and threatening.
Exodus 32 narrates one of the darkest moments of Israel's wilderness journey. While Moses is on Mount Sinai receiving the Law, the people gather around Aaron and demand a god they can see: 'Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don't know what has happened to him' (Exodus 32:1). Aaron collects their golden jewelry and fashions a calf, and the people declare 'These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt!' They offer burnt offerings and 'sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry' (Exodus 32:6).
Nolde's painting renders this scene in an explosion of yellows, reds, and blues that reduces the narrative to its most elemental visual content: human figures in ecstatic motion around an implied center, the colors vibrating with an intensity that borders on violence. The figures do not clearly individuate as men and women, Israelites or Egyptians: they are human bodies in the grip of collective possession, surrendered to an energy that is neither controlled nor directed. The painting refuses to judge this. It presents the dance as both beautiful and disturbing, which is precisely its theological force.
Nolde's own relationship to religion was complex and idiosyncratic. He was raised Lutheran, deeply formed by the pietist religious culture of North Germany, and his biblical paintings throughout his career combined an intense personal religiosity with a formal radicalism that the German art establishment found difficult to accommodate. He was drawn to the Old Testament narratives of human extremity - the dance around the golden calf, the life of Christ in its most physically intense moments - because he believed that Expressionist formal violence was the honest visual equivalent of the extremity these narratives described.
The painting was included in the Nazis' Degenerate Art exhibition of 1937 - a bitter irony given that Nolde had himself been an early sympathizer with National Socialism, believing in the late 1920s and early 1930s that the Nazi movement represented a German cultural renewal he could support. The rejection of his work by the regime he had supported, and the classification of his art as 'degenerate' despite his own politics, was a trauma from which Nolde never fully recovered. He painted in secret during the war years, creating a series of small watercolors - the 'Unpainted Pictures' - that he could not exhibit.
The theological appropriateness of the golden calf as Nolde's subject is in retrospect striking. Exodus 32's narrative is about the human tendency to construct manageable substitutes for the demanding, uncontrollable presence of the living God - to prefer a deity that can be made by human hands and worshiped in an ecstasy of collective emotion over the God who speaks from a mountain in fire and gives commandments that require lifelong obedience. Nolde's painting, with its beautiful but disturbing frenzy, captures this dynamic with a precision that no more sedate treatment could have achieved.