Well, Ernst Wilhelm

* June 11, 1902 Berlin - † April 8, 1968 Cologne

biography

Ernst Wilhelm Nay was born in Berlin in 1902 and dropped out of an apprenticeship as a bookseller after graduating from high school. He started painting as a schoolboy, portraying his mother and sister. The 23-year-old self-taught artist's "Portrait of Franz Reuter" caused a stir at the spring exhibition at the Berlin Academy of Arts among works by Kirchner and Kokoschka. Carl Georg Heise, director of the Lübeck and later Hamburg art collections, became aware of the young artist whose early figurative work was somewhere between late expressionism and the academy style. A scholarship arranged by Heise enabled Nay to travel to Bornholm in 1930. The pictures created during this time already announced Nay's departure from academism. The rise to power of the National Socialists increasingly threatened his existence as an artist. His painting was considered “degenerate”. In 1937 the Nazis had his works removed from museums and banned him from working. In the same year, Nay traveled to Lofoten following an invitation from Edvard Munch. The stay became an artistic turning point for Nay. Here he found his style, gradually moving away from the representational and figurative and turning to large color fields. "In the bright nights, the first dynamic-rhythmic designs emerged from the fermatas of the mountainous sea islands, which later - independent of the subject matter - would become the main spiritual theme of my art," he noted in 1961. Back from Norway, Nay survived the Second World War as a map artist France. After 1945, the actually abstract phase of his painting began, the highlight of which is the so-called “disc paintings”. In ever new variations, Nay created his symphonies of expressive color circles. They established his international fame and at the same time form the actual core of his oeuvre. At the height of his career - during the "documenta" in 1964 - critical voices were of course also loud: Nay was arbitrary, decorative, simple. The artist reacted hurt, but continued to paint consistently. In the last years of his work he reduced the colors and simplified the forms. On April 8, 1968, he died of a heart attack in Cologne at the age of 65. His place in art history is undisputed today.