NAY, ERNST WILHELM
1902 Berlin–1968 Cologne

Title: "Dunkelrote Nacht".
Date: 1965.
Technique: Oil on canvas.
Measurement: 110.5 x 100.5 cm.
Notation: Signed, titled and dated verso on the stretcher upper: E. W. NAY "Dunkelrote NACHT" - 1965.


We are grateful to the Ernst Wilhelm Nay Foundation, Cologne, for its generous academic support.



Provenance:
- - Galerie Günther Franke, Munich 1965 (label)

- Dr Wolfgang Münch, Kaiserslautern

- Galerie Brockstedt, Hamburg 1987 (label)

- Günter Röse Collection, Hanover (stamp)

- Private collection, Berlin

- Private collection, Lower Saxony


Exhibition:
- Günther Franke Gallery, Munich 1965

- Museum of Municipal Art Collections, Bonn 1970


Literature:
- Scheibler, Aurel: Ernst Wilhelm Nay – Werkverzeichnis der Ölgemälde, Vol. II 1952–1968, Cologne 1990, cat. no. 1148, ill.

- Ernst Wilhelm Nay Foundation (ed.): Werkverzeichnis - www.nay.aps-info.de, cat. rais. no. WV-S 1148 (last accessed 17 April 2026)

- Exhib. cat. E. W. Nay, Galerie Günther Franke, Munich 1965, cat. no. 13

- Exhib. cat. E. W. Nay – Bilder aus den Jahren 1935-1968, Museum Städtische Kunstsammlungen, Bonn 1970, cat. no. 32



- From the artist’s important late period

- The familiar eye motif, rendered as an abstract human figure, lends the work a transcendental depth

- Participant in the first three documenta exhibitions in 1955, 1959 and 1964



The Fortune of the Diligent: Ernst Wilhelm Nay’s Consistent Path

Ernst Wilhelm Nay is undoubtedly one of the artists who most profoundly shaped postwar modernism in Germany. Against the backdrop of the upheavals of the early twentieth century, the biography of this extraordinarily productive painter appears remarkably fortunate and coherent in its trajectory.

Born in Berlin as the son of a senior civil servant, Ernst Wilhelm Nay discovered his enthusiasm for painting while still at school. After abandoning an apprenticeship as a bookseller, he had the good fortune in 1924 to present his early artistic efforts to Karl Hofer. Hofer recognized the young artist’s talent, secured him a scholarship, and later became his professor at the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts.

By 1927, Nay’s participation in exhibitions was already receiving press attention, followed soon after by his first museum acquisitions. The Prix de Rome awarded by the Prussian Academy of Arts further enhanced his reputation. In 1933, Nay’s works were included in a group exhibition at the Berlin galleries of Alfred Flechtheim and Paul Cassirer, and his network within the art world expanded steadily.

His acquaintance with the Lübeck museum director Carl Georg Heise opened further doors. Heise had already arranged a scholarship for Nay in 1930. In 1937, when the painter was officially classified as “degenerate,” it was once again Heise who persuaded Edvard Munch to support Nay financially, enabling him to travel to the Lofoten Islands and establish contacts with the Norwegian art market.

Ernst Wilhelm Nay experienced most of the Second World War as a cartographer in France, where the “degenerate” artist was seemingly able to pursue his own painting more freely outside military service than he could at home. After 1945, a return to Berlin proved impossible: both his apartment and studio had been destroyed.

Once again, personal networks proved decisive. Nay had known the influential collector and art dealer Hanna Bekker vom Rath since 1935. She arranged a studio house for him in Hochheim am Taunus. In 1950, the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hanover acknowledged Nay’s significance with his first retrospective exhibition.

Throughout the 1950s—after relocating to Cologne in 1951—his reputation grew nationally and internationally. Ernst Wilhelm Nay held his first solo exhibitions in the United States, represented the Federal Republic of Germany at the 1956 Venice Biennale, and participated in the first three documenta exhibitions in Kassel. He died in Cologne in 1968.



From Figuration to Abstraction

In the catalogue raisonné compiled by Elisabeth Nay-Scheibler, Ernst Wilhelm Nay’s oeuvre is divided into approximately ten distinguishable pictorial structures or phases. Initially, the painter worked with figurative motifs—people, still lifes, and landscapes—which in the 1930s became increasingly transformed through surrealist tendencies and, later, through an emphasis on colour and dynamism across the picture plane. Yet the recognizable always remained visible.

Around 1950, this changed fundamentally. Whether inspired by the simplifying possibilities of lithography or by the sensory experiences of metropolitan life and music in Cologne, Ernst Wilhelm Nay reduced his painting to colour itself on surface.

Certain formal elements—circles, diamonds, or eye-like motifs—appeared as recurring signs or ciphers. Out of this emerged the Rhythmic Paintings, the celebrated Disc Paintings, and the Eye Paintings of the 1950s and 1960s.

Toward the end of his career, in the so-called Late Paintings beginning around 1965—often characterized by picture-filling sequences of coloured forms—Ernst Wilhelm Nay occasionally returned to shapes that abstractly evoke the human figure.



The Formulation of the Human in Dark Red Night

In his 1967 essay My Colour, Nay wrote:

“It is worth a lifetime to advance to the point where the real colour-image can emerge, and colour resounds in such a way that, without any particular intention on the part of the artist, something human becomes visible—human and creaturely existence in a new, unknown formulation.”

(Magdalena Claesges, E.W. Nay – Lesebuch, Cologne, 2002, pp. 297–298)

Dark Red Night (Dunkelrote Nacht) seems to belong to precisely this category. Lush yellow forms and small red reflections are arranged vertically to the right and left against a black ground. Between them—and visually dominant, moving diagonally across the composition—runs a reddish-brown form traversed by broad passages of white.

The familiar spindle or eye motif reappears here; yet the composition as a whole also evokes the association of a human torso. Everything remains resolutely flat, yet delicate blue veils within the white generate an almost transcendental sense of depth.

The immediately preceding catalogue raisonné number belongs to the painting Yellow Between Two Times (Gelb zwischen zwei Zeiten, fig. 1), which, though considerably larger than the present work, appears almost like a daytime counterpart to Dark Red Night.

Alexandra Bresges-Jung



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