Ernst Wilhelm NAY

Ernst Wilhelm Nay – Life, Colour and Original Prints

Ernst Wilhelm Nay (born in Berlin on 11 June 1902, died in Cologne on 8 April 1968) was one of the leading German painters of the post-war decades and among the most original colourists of European abstraction. A pupil of Karl Hofer, branded ‘degenerate’ by the Nazi regime, he made his name after 1945 with mythological canvases painted in Hofheim and then with the celebrated Scheibenbilder or ‘disc paintings’ of the later 1950s. He showed at the first three documenta exhibitions in Kassel and was given the German pavilion at the 1956 Venice Biennale. Though above all a painter, he also left a body of original prints – lithographs, intaglio prints and screenprints – in which pure colour carries the composition.

Le Coin des Arts follows Nay’s work closely and currently offers one original lithograph, La Main (1967), a sheet from his final years, when bright primary colours and sign-like forms replaced the discs. Further Nay prints are added when good impressions appear, chosen for printing quality, edition, provenance and condition; use the ‘follow the artist’ button to be told when they arrive.

A Berlin education: Schulpforta, Hofer and Rome

Nay was the son of Hermann Johannes Nay, a senior official at the Imperial Treasury who was killed in Belgium in 1914. After boarding at Schulpforta, where he took his Abitur in 1921, he attended evening life classes at Berlin’s school of applied arts. Karl Hofer saw his work and secured him a grant to join his painting class at the Berlin academy, which Nay attended from 1925 to 1928. A visit to Paris in 1928, and the paintings of Poussin he studied there, confirmed his belief that colour was the foundation of painting. Recognition came early: the Nationalgalerie in Berlin bought a beach scene painted on Bornholm in 1930, and in 1931 the Prussian Academy of Arts awarded him its state prize, with a nine-month fellowship at the Villa Massimo in Rome. On his way home he met the Munich dealer Günther Franke, who would champion him for decades.

Norway, the Lofoten Islands and the ‘Degenerate Art’ years

As conditions for modern artists in Germany worsened, the Lübeck museum director Carl Georg Heise arranged for Nay to be invited to Edvard Munch’s studio near Oslo in 1937. He spent several months on the Lofoten Islands that year and returned in 1938; the Arctic light and stark coastline produced a series of boldly outlined, intensely coloured landscapes. In the same year two of his paintings, taken from museums in Berlin and Lübeck, hung in the ‘Entartete Kunst’ exhibition; ten further works were confiscated and he was forbidden to exhibit. Called up in 1940, he served as a map draughtsman in France, which still left him time to paint – pictures that avoid the war itself and search instead for a new kind of pictorial space.

Hofheim and Cologne: from Hecate to the disc paintings

Released from American captivity in May 1945 and with his Berlin studio destroyed, Nay settled in Hofheim am Taunus. There he painted the Hekatebilder, canvases with titles drawn from Greek myth in which fragmented figures dissolve into planes of colour. He exhibited at the 1948 Venice Biennale; the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hanover gave him his first retrospective in 1950. In 1949 he married Elisabeth Scheibler, formerly assistant to Günther Franke, who later looked after his estate. In 1951 he moved to Cologne, his home for the rest of his life. His essay Vom Gestaltwert der Farbe (‘On the formal value of colour’) appeared in 1955, the year he reduced his colour fields to discs. The resulting Scheibenbilder brought international recognition: documenta I (1955), the Lichtwark Prize in Hamburg, his first exhibition in the United States, the German pavilion in Venice in 1956, documenta II (1959) and the São Paulo Biennial.

Eye paintings, documenta III and late signs

In the early 1960s the discs dissolved and overlapped into eye-like forms, the Augenbilder. At documenta III in 1964, three huge canvases hung at an angle beneath the ceiling provoked fierce debate. From 1965 his painting was pared down to primary colours and ornamental, sign-like shapes – the world of La Main. He received the Berlin Art Prize in 1964 and the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic in 1967; a touring retrospective travelled from Stuttgart to Berlin, Mannheim and Vienna in 1966–67. Nay died of heart failure in Cologne on 8 April 1968, aged 65.

Nay in Britain: Edinburgh, Tate and London

Nay was long little known in the United Kingdom. His major retrospective of 1990–91, organised in Cologne, travelled to the Kunsthalle Basel and to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. Tate holds the oil painting White Spring (Weisse Quelle, 1963), and when the Hamburger Kunsthalle opened its 2022 retrospective it cited recent acquisitions by Tate Modern as evidence of renewed interest in the artist. In London, Almine Rech mounted the artist’s first solo exhibition in the capital, from 3 October 2017 to 13 January 2018, in collaboration with the Ernst Wilhelm Nay Foundation and Aurel Scheibler, concentrating on the paintings made between documenta III and his death.

The printed work and the Gabler catalogue

The standard catalogue of the prints is Karlheinz Gabler, E. W. Nay. Die Druckgraphik 1923–1968 (Belser, Stuttgart, 1975). Prints are cited as ‘Gabler’ plus a number: the 1952 colour lithograph in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, is Gabler 39; Algraphie 1953-2 is Gabler 43; the colour aquatint of 1963 is Gabler 68; a large colour lithograph of 1968 is Gabler 92. Nay often titled his prints simply by technique, year and sequence number, so the descriptive title and the Gabler number together pin down the sheet.

He worked chiefly in lithography – including algraphy, printed from aluminium plates – but also in intaglio: an etching with drypoint and aquatint of 1957, in an edition of 35, is in the Museum of Modern Art. The 1963 colour aquatint was printed in Paris by Georges Visat for the Overbeck-Gesellschaft in Lübeck, in 150 impressions. Early editions are small (40 for Algraphie 1953-2); those of the 1960s are larger.

Collecting Ernst Wilhelm Nay prints: a buyer’s guide

Catalogue raisonné. Always ask for the Gabler number, which fixes date, technique, edition and publisher.

Edition. Editions run from a few dozen to 150, and up to 300 for some late lithographs; check that the number matches Gabler. See the printing.

Signature and estate. Lifetime impressions are signed ‘Nay’ in pencil, often with the year abbreviated. Some 1968 lithographs instead carry the handwritten inscription ‘Nachlass Nay: Elisabeth Nay’: genuine estate impressions, but not signed by the artist, and they should be described as such. See the signature.

Paper and condition. Nay’s brilliant colours are sensitive to light; look for fading, foxing and old hinges, and choose conservation framing.

Pitfalls. Exhibition posters, offset reproductions and book plates are not original prints. Our guarantees are set out on the authenticity page; see also what is an original print.

The gallery shows Nay alongside other masters of post-war abstraction: Hans Hartung, Serge Poliakoff, Pierre Alechinsky, Giuseppe Santomaso and Horst Antes. Explore the School of Paris and lyrical abstraction and our engravings and lithographs.

Sources and further reading

Karlheinz Gabler, E. W. Nay. Die Druckgraphik 1923–1968, Belser, Stuttgart, 1975 · Aurel Scheibler, Ernst Wilhelm Nay. Werkverzeichnis der Ölgemälde, 2 vols, 1990 · Werner Haftmann, E. W. Nay, 1960 · Tate – Ernst Wilhelm Nay · Almine Rech – Ernst Wilhelm Nay, London 2017 · Deutsche Biographie – Nay · Hamburger Kunsthalle – Retrospective 2022