Discover Germany | Special Theme | Museums, Culture and History
E. W. Nay - Chromatik stark und zart, 1956, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA. © 2018 E. Nay-Scheibler, Cologne / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Colour as a painting’s autonomous energy The painter Ernst Wilhelm Nay (1902 – 1968) is one of the most well-known postwar German artists. His work can be found in nearly all important public and private collections devoted to the postwar period. TEXT: ERNST WILHELM NAY STIFTUNG
The pictorial and graphic œuvre of Ernst Wilhelm Nay spans almost half a century, from the mid 1920s to 1968. We look at an extraordinary artistic development, one of constant transformation within the interstitial divide between abstraction and figuration, brought to an abrupt end by a sudden heart arrest 50 years ago in April 1968: Nay was 65 years old. Condemned as a ‘degenerate artist’ by Nazi officials in 1937, Nay was forbidden to show his work in Germany. However, he was rehabilitated after the war ended and his artistic career received huge acclaim not only in Germany, but also in Europe, and soon in the US. His work 38 | Issue 61 | April 2018
occupied a central feature in the first three documenta exhibitions and represented Germany at the 1956 Venice Biennale. With good reason, Nay is now considered the one German artist who, after 1945, has realised colour as a painting’s autonomous energy most consequently. He worked in series focusing on particular forms and shapes and developed powerful and innovative concepts. One of the main series is devoted to the flat and round figure of the disk. The renowned ‘Disk’ (1954-1962) and subsequently ‘Eyepaintings’ (1963-1964) – present a planar choreography and define the disk as a ‘universal and potential energy form’.
In the ‘Disk’ series he unfolded a vibrant visual space that lent each composition its own unique ‘sound’. And just as the Pythagoreans developed a theory of the structure of the universe in which number, music and spheres could be represented as interrelated, with Nay the elements of pictorial composition were brought into a coherence that could serve as a universal simile. Created at the high point of his ‘Disk’-painting series, Ernst Wilhelm Nay’s Red Whirls in Blue (1961) from the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (opposite page) marks a pivotal moment of the artist’s mature œuvre and emphasises the position of Nay as one of the 20th century’s most important colourists and a leading representative of postwar modernism. www.ewnay.de