Ernst Wilhelm Nay

After a first study trip to Paris, the art historian Georg Carl Heise gave him in 1930 a scholarship for a stay on Bornholm, where he created the so-called "beach pictures".

A year later, he received the Villa Massimo Fellowship in Rome from the Prussian Academy of Arts, where small-format, surrealist-abstract images were taken.

In a critical article of the National Socialists in the "Volkischer Beobachter" of February 25, 1933, his picture "Liebespaar" was mocked in 1930 as a "masterpiece of vulgarity".

Through Heise's mediation, Nay received financial support from Edvard Munch, which enabled him to travel to the Norwegian Lofoten Islands, where he painted large-format watercolors.

And was able to move into a small studio house through the intermediary of collector and art dealer Hanna Bekker vom Rath.

As early as 1946 he met Elisabeth Kerschbaumer, the assistant to his gallery owner Günther Franke in Munich, and whom he married after a mutual divorce by Elly Nay in 1949.

In 1953 he drew an abstract film ("A melody, four painters", directed by Herbert Seggelke) together with Jean Cocteau, Gino Severini and Hans Erni.

The following explanations are based on the introductory texts on the various phases of Elisabeth Nay-Scheibler's work in the catalogue raisonné of oil paintings.

The early pictures of Nay show autodidactically painted landscapes and portraits of his immediate surroundings, in which influences of Henri Matisse and his teacher Karl Hofer are recognizable.

A special place takes the painting "portrait Franz Reuter" (WV 6) from 1925, "the image in which Nay was aware of being a painter."

His attachment to abstraction is already evident in the details of the paintings, and during his nine-month stay in Rome in 1931/32, Nay has hardly any eyes for the "classical" art of this city, but begins to work on oddly surreal, small-format still life with larvae, shells or worms to work ("Large shell with men", 1932, WV 110, "fleeing worms", 1932, WV 128).

In his "Regests to life and work" he remembered this time: "[...] 1931/32 I was at the German Academy in Rome, annoying because I was crammed into school with the relics of humanistic education (...

Inspired by summer stays on the Baltic Sea, where he led a simple life with the fishermen, Nay recognized in the constant ups and downs of the swell an original form of dynamics ("dunes", 1935, WV 175).

Even in prehistoric times, the wave or serpentine line with its alternating up and down bows as a sign of the eternal movement of death and rebirth.

In numerous large-format pen and ink drawings, which translate the entrances and exits of the boats and the activity of the fishermen into free line art, Nay prepared his so-called "dune and fisherman pictures", which also show a strong dynamic in the movement of the swells, but is also expressed in the contrasting verticals of the boat masts and sails ("Ostseefischer I", 1935, WV 189) .The figures of the fishermen are highly abstracted, their spherical or triangular heads showing only a single punctiform eye in the middle.

Most of the works from the France period show thematically legendary scenes in which abstracted figures seem to be involved in a superpersonal, tragic or euphoric event.

In order to bridge the seemingly perspicuous interstices of his intensively colored and dense pictorial compositions, he invented a motif of alternating repetitive checkerboard patterns, a design element that he would always use later.

Nay reacts to this change from a rural domicile to the urban, lively departure situation of the Rhenish metropolis with a new, completely non-objective image design.

Looking back on this period, Nay wrote in 1962: "I was particularly interested in the absolute tone and the often extended negative forms of Webern's music.

In his most well-known, longest and critically most successful period to date, Nay makes the round shape of the disc – in all its variations – the main motif of his painting, which he now increasingly reflects theoretically.

As Nay discovered the "disc" as a central design element, he himself describes it this way: "That's how it started I started with very innocuous new experiments and found out: If I go with a brush on the canvas, there is a small blob, I enlarge that, then I have a disc.This disc is of course already doing a lot on the surface If I add other slices, then a system of at least colored and quantitative proportions is created, which can now be combined and further assembled into larger image complexes. "

Behind this was the fact that Nay felt that he had to "open" or "overcome" his hitherto stringently enforced system of selective placement of color at some point, so as not to get stuck in a "modern academy of painting".

But he does not renounce the association of the magical aura of this figurative form, but brings the effect of the large-scale eye-forms of his images into balance with a very moving, abstract formal language, which he incorporates into a passionately unfolding chromaticism.

Deutscher Pavillon, 28 Biennale die Venezia, Venedig 1959: E. W. Nay (Retrospektive), Kunstverein für Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf 1964: I. Internationale der Zeichnung.

Bilder der 1960er Jahre, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt a. Main/ Haus am Waldsee, Berlin 2013/2014 Ernst Wilhelm Nay.