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Part of the same private collection for over half a century, Von Goldfarben und Blau (Of Gold and Blue) (1953) and Chromatische Ketten (Chromatic Chains) (1954) represent the very first iterations of Ernst Wilhelm Nay's celebrated Scheibenbilder (Disc paintings). Created in the early 1950s, these were the years in which Nay made his decisive breakthrough, gaining recognition not only in Germany but internationally. Indeed in 1955, shortly after these works were completed, the artist received his first one-man retrospective in the United States and was honoured with a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale, also being included in Documenta. Proliferating with gestural forms and brilliant, circular spots of colour across their surfaces, the paintings take on a lyrical almost rhythmic form, reflecting the vibrant mood of post-War Cologne. In Von Goldfarben und Blau, the work is animated with trails of spots and densely painted blocks of colour in vermillion red, burnt ochre, golden yellow and ink blue. Gestured over one portion of the surface are impulsive, linear strokes of paint, breaking up the pulsating array of improvised shapes. In Chromatische Ketten the visually arresting composition combines squares with multi-hued and complementary circles of paint running like links in a chain as alluded to by the work's title. The colours are vivid, incorporating black with cyan blue, mustard yellow, scarlet red and orange to great effect. Nay moved to Cologne in 1951, encountering a vital cultural atmosphere despite the years of privation caused by the War. Contemporary composers such as Boulez, Nono and Stockhausen were busy expressing a new freedom in music and Nay became readily involved in these performances. The artist staged his own visual events and these 'veritably effervesced with joie de vivre, rhythm, opulence of colour, rapidity of stroke, and a reveling in energy-charged movement' (S. Gohr, 'Ernst Wilhelm Nay - An Essay', Ernst Wilhelm Nay, exh. cat., Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1998, p. 27). Von Goldfarben und Blau and Chromatische Ketten mark the height of this period. Indeed in these works he translates onto canvas a sense of 'surface choreography' and 'surface tension', similar to that encountered in the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Embarking upon his Scheibenbilder (Disc paintings), he combined this free, musical aesthetic with painted circular forms. As he himself explained, 'if I set a coloured dot on an empty surface an astonishing number of tensions were created. If I spread out the dot, the tensions increased. A second such disc, a third, a fourth - all the same size, already created a highly complicated formal relation. A number of colours also emerged if I made each disc a different colour, they could be regarded as a chromatic sequence. The spaces between created forms and could be developed quite mechanically with the same colours in a specific alternation, creating a corrugated surface so that interlinking resulted this way of experimenting with a pictorial whole enabled endless variations' (E. W. Nay quoted in Nay Retrospektive, exh. cat., Josef Haubrich Kunsthalle, Cologne, 1991, pp. 36-37). At the time, Nay stood as an almost symbolic marker in the debate between figuration and abstraction. Germany itself was a country divided between the East and West, and in the arts this was perpetuated by a Western identification with abstraction and an Eastern predilection for realism. Nay was familiar with this confrontation between opposing artistic ideologies, having first encountered it in the late 1930s with the rise of National Socialism. Indeed under Nazism, Nay's paintings were included in the notorious Entartete Kunst exhibition, a show devised by the regime to denounce all modern art. PROPERTY FROM THE HUBERTUS WALD CHARITABLE FOUNDATION

Ernst Wilhelm Nay (1902-1968)

Chromatische Ketten (Chromatic Chains)

Details

Ernst Wilhelm Nay (1902-1968)
Chromatische Ketten (Chromatic Chains)
signed and dated 'NAY. 54.' (lower right); signed, titled and dated 'NAY- Chromatische KETTEN- 1954' (on the stretcher)
oil on canvas
35½ x 48¼in. (90.2 x 125.5cm.)
Painted in 1954

Provenance

Eberhard Reitzenstein-Seel Collection, Berlin.
Hubertus Wald, Hamburg, by whom acquired from the above by the present owner in 1955.

Literature

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 1963, no. 93 (illustrated, p. 13).
A. Scheibler, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Werkverzeichnis der Ölgemälde, Band II, 1952-1968, Cologne 1990, no. 724 (illustrated, p. 77).

Exhibited

Frankfurt, Frankfurter Kunstverein Steinernes Haus, Moderne Malerei-Frankfurter Privatbesitz, 1963, no. 96 (illustrated).
Hamburg, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Sammlung Wald, 2003.

Special Notice

Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent.

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Chromatische Ketten (Chromatic Chains)

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