FRANKFURT.- Ernst Wilhelm Nay is one of the most renowned German postwar artists. His abstract paintings are to be found in nearly all important public and private collections with works from that era. Nay’s late work of the 1960s, dating mainly from the years after the artist’s participation in the documenta III in 1964 to his death in 1968, is, however, less known and, therefore, still largely underrated. Presenting approximately 30 large-size paintings and 86 works on paper, the exhibition in the Schirn will focus on this late work for the first time, introducing an artist who, with his dynamically two-dimensional forms and clear colors transcending the pictorial space, makes an impression that is not historical at all but surprisingly up-to-date. The exhibition will also include a reconstruction of the spectacular Nay room at the documenta III of 1964, where three large-format works of the artist were hung from the ceiling, as an environment.

Ernst Wilhelm Nay (1902 Berlin – 1968 Cologne) has ranked among the most acclaimed representatives of abstract painting in Germany since the mid-fifties at the latest. When Nay began to dedicate himself to painting he did so without formal tuition. After having presented himself to Karl Hofer with three paintings, he was accepted to his painting class at the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts as a scholarship student, where he completed his studies as Hofer’s master-class student in 1928. During several summer stays on the coast of the Baltic Sea, he started on his first major work group, the Dunes and Fishermen Pictures, powerful dynamic compositions with stylized landscapes and figures. In the course of the initiative “Degenerate Art,” the Nazis confiscated ten of Nay’s works in public collections in 1937. The artist was forbidden to show his works in exhibitions in Germany. From 1940 to 1946, Nay was put into action in World War II, but again and again found the opportunity to paint in utmost secrecy. After the war, Nay lived in Hofheim am Taunus until 1951, where he could move into a studio building thanks to the intervention of Hanna Bekker vom Rath. Hofheim and the Blue House had already been a meeting place for modern artists and their followers before the war and served this purpose again in the postwar years. Nay worked on his mostly small-format Hekate Pictures there, whose expressive abstract forms with their worked-in figure and landscape associations he abandoned in favor of clear outlines in the following phase. In 1951, Nay took up residence in Cologne with his second wife Elisabeth; the city was to remain the center of his life until his death. One of his most powerful work phases began with the Disc Pictures in 1954, which not only brought his breakthrough in Europe, where he participated in the first three documenta exhibitions and in the Venice Biennial, but also in the USA. In his Disc Pictures Nay left behind all angular forms. Relying on crystal-clear, bright colors, he composed large and small discs and their intermediate forms into an exciting choreography of colors on his pictures’ surfaces. The work group Eye Pictures dating from 1963 and after, which culminating in the pieces for the documenta III of 1964, was followed by the last phase of the Elementary Pictures in 1965, which ended with Nay’s death in 1968.

The exhibition in the Schirn centers exclusively on Nay’s little-known late work mainly created in the years from the documenta III to his death. One of the reasons for the insufficient awareness of his late work is its history of reception. Nay’s participation in the documenta III caused a debate that strikes us as largely incomprehensible today. It was triggered by the painter and art critic Hans Platschek who attacked Nay in a polemic article in the weekly Die Zeit on 4 September 1964; numerous comments and statements by both supporters of Nay and his opponents followed. One key reproach focused on Nay’s prominent position at the documenta III, where the artist’s three large-size Eye Pictures were not only presented in a separate room, but also hanging from the ceiling in a spectacular manner. The fact that the idea for this hanging had not been Nay’s but developed by Arnold Bode, who was in charge of the documenta, did not bother the critics in their attacks. Considering the rest of Platschek’s other formulations and his anything but conclusive arguments – such as the statement that Nay’s Disc Pictures are “insignificant” and the manifestation of a “backward-looking utopia” – in more detail, it is difficult to take the attacks as serious as they obviously were at the time. The outcome of this debate was definitely not only a strain for Nay personally, but also influenced the public perception of the Elementary Pictures he painted after the documenta.

Some important and influential friends and supporters of Nay’s work – like the art critic Will Grohmann, the gallerist Günther Franke, the director of the documenta Arnold Bode, the later director of the Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin Werner Haftmann, or the Director of the Kunsthalle Basel Arnold Rüdlinger – reacted positively to the works of this last phase and regarded them as an interesting further development of the artist’s lifelong approach. Other critics and especially private collectors, however, could not follow Nay on his new way, because the stylistic change struck them as too radical. This explains why – compared to Nay’s considerably better known work groups from the 1950s and early 1960s, his Disc Pictures and Eye Pictures – there are far fewer works of this phase to be found in museums and private collections. The Eye Pictures are characterized by the addition of horizontal elements and by the “crossing out” of discs respectively, which made the viewer think of eyes, though Nay had completely dedicated himself to pure abstraction since the beginnings of the 1950s.

While the Eye Pictures, including the documenta paintings also shown at the Schirn, were full of three-dimensional elements, radiating expressiveness and concrete association, the Elementary Pictures with their extensive graphic forms present themselves as both simple and complex at the same time. With the Elementary Pictures, Nay achieved the last, decisive stylistic change in his work from 1965 on. Vegetable and anthropomorphous forms alternate, being joined by spindles, chains, oval discs, colored bands, and curved patterns. Their two-dimensionality or renunciation of illusionist pictorial spaces produces positive and negative forms, enclosures and exclusions. The way of painting also changed, and Nay began to prefer washed colors he applied in very thin layers, which enhanced his works’ clarity. In addition, he had begun to rely on very cool and mixed colors in sometimes daring combinations such as lilac/lemon-yellow or blue-green/black/white. White patterns and ornaments emerge where the artist has left the primer untouched. Flat ellipses, jagged edges, and the reduction to three primary or non-colors give rise to dynamic compositions rich in contrast, which seem to visually extend beyond the pictures’ edges.

“Pictures come from pictures” is a quotation by Nay which holds especially true for the group of his Elementary Pictures. The serial character, which determined Nay’s working method from its beginnings, culminates in these pieces. Much in these paintings – their stretching out into their surroundings, their monumental two-dimensional nature – seems to anticipate the approach of the next generation’s Hard-edge painters. Nay, for his part, was influenced by Henri Matisse’s cut-outs.

In addition to the reconstruction of the documenta room and the Elementary Pictures of the artist’s late oeuvre, the Schirn will, as a third attraction, present a comprehensive selection from Nay’s altogether 2,500 pen, felt tip and ink drawings from his later years for the first time. Most of these mainly DIN-A4-sized drawings show linear structures in black. An endless stream of ideas seems to have welled from the artist’s imagination: some resemble drafts for his Elementary Pictures, many reveal numbers of names of colors along their margins. Remarkably, though, Nay almost never kept exactly to his sketches. Viewed from a broader perspective, the drawings breathe a definite timelessness.

No other painter of the 1960s has varied his subject with such intensity as E.W. Nay did. The principle of taking up one’s central thread again and again, of returning to one’s key methods and continuously changing things on one’s quest for the same and unfalteringly pursuing one’s way, was typical of him. What Nay aimed at was that his art remained “dynamic and present” throughout all phases. His crucial artistic value was freedom which he understood as keeping his distance to all religious, formal, and ideological – i.e. restricting – rules. This is also why he turned to new work series from time to time because he was always afraid to settle into a paralyzing routine when going through a successful phase.

Nay belonged to a generation that was well familiar with the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and Gottfried Benn. The image of the artist drawn in their texts was one of a free and independent outsider, of an incorruptible person, of an exceptional man. Art had largely taken the place of religion and played an equally prominent role in Nay’s world view. “Against geometry, against illusion, against the myth” was how Nay himself summarized his philosophy as a painter in 1968 shortly before his death. In this sense his works from 1965 to 1968 may be regarded as the peak of a development that spanned many years.