Helle Girlande (Light Garland)

A symphony of blue, green and white float and effervesce across Ernst Wilhelm Nay’s large Helle Girlande (Light Garland). Painted in 1957, the work was first included in Nay’s joint exhibition with Willi Baumeister at the Kunsthalle Basel three years thereafter, and most recently was recently shown at Munich’s Haus der Kunst in 2009. Helle Girlande is a striking example from the Scheibenbilder or Disc Paintings, the series which brought him worldwide acclaim. The aqueous quality of the painting’s discs is further emphasised by their stunning, cerulean blue; they seem to pool and bubble directly from the canvas itself. Describing the discs, art historian Standish D. Lawder wrote, ‘They quietly float and glide upward and outward, sometimes fusing, sometimes separating, slowly and softly drifting towards the confines of the canvas and even beyond it. For the frame of the picture is quite arbitrary, and the space beyond these artificial demarcations exists just as surely as the pattern of the stars will be repeated when the position of a telescope is shifted to the left or right, up or down’ (S. Lawder, ‘Ernest Wilhelm Nay: An Evaluation of His Recent Paintings’, Art Journal, vol. 21, no. 2 (Winter, 1961-1962), p. 101). Indeed, Helle Girlande displays a weightlessness. In their reach towards the infinite celestial, the discs expand in a dazzling, dizzying surge of boundless colour.
Nay’s optimistic palette was a direct response to the horrors of the Second World War, in the aftermath of which he moved to Cologne, where he encountered a vibrant music scene seemingly untouched by the war. He met composers such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and the paintings of the decade reflect a new musicality. Like a symphony’s score, these too were precisely planned arrangements; as Nay explained, ‘Just as a composer works with sounds, I wanted to work with colours as a means of combining rhythm, values, dynamics and series to form a surface’ (E. Nay, ‘Notes by E. W. Nay’, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, exh. cat., Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1998, p. 104). The Scheibenbilder express a lively tempo and speak to the artist’s sanguinity and hope for rejuvenation in the wake of the war’s destruction. Lacking any symbolism or external reference, the subject of these images is the paint itself and the rich accumulations of all-over colour. Guided by the relationship between colour and form, Nay’s tones vary in shade and opacity to produce dense compositions that seem to defy gravity. He called his new mode of image-making Veranstaltung (happening), hoping ‘to conjure up an epiphany through painterly means alone’ (S. Gohr, ‘Ernst Wilhelm Nay: An Essay,’ in Ernst Wilhelm Nay, exh. cat., Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1998, p. 25). The paintings of this period were not meant to be escapist but rather represent the artist’s endeavours to develop a new visual language as a force for transformation and regeneration. Such hope is evident in Helle Girlande, whose kaleidoscopic particles appear to reproduce and proliferate yielding new dreams for tomorrow.