What you first notice in Frühe – Grün Weiß (Early – Green and White) by Ernst Wilhelm Nay is a network of lines, spots, and areas arranged into patterns, sometimes overlapping, sometimes separated from one another by black lines. What seems quite arbitrary is actually the result of a very deliberate decision by the painter: quickly drawn line formations and systematically arranged colour forms, free improvisation and a strong picture construction.
The work is one of the earliest of Nay’s disc paintings, which include Chromatische Scheiben (Chromatic Discs) from 1960 and which is also part of the Reinhard Ernst Collection. In the painting Frühe – Grün Weiß, he combined the motif of the disc with other geometric forms in order to explore the compositional and colour possibilities.
Ernst Wilhelm Nay (1902–1968)
Frühe-Grün Weiß, 1954
Currently exhibited: No
Material: Oil on canvas
Size: 125 x 200 cm
Inv-Nr.: B_326
Image rights: VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Keywords:
Previous owner: Galerie Schlichtenmaier, Grafenau, 2007
Acquisition: Reinhard Ernst Collection, private collection, 2014
Solo exhibitions:
1970
Museum Städtische Kunstsammlungen, Bonn
1959
Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf
1955
Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hanover
1954
Galerie Günther Franke, Munich
Group exhibition:
1955
‘The 1955 Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting’, Department of Fine Arts Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
What you first notice in Frühe – Grün Weiß (Early – Green and White) by Ernst Wilhelm Nay is a network of lines, spots, and areas arranged into patterns, sometimes overlapping, sometimes separated from one another by black lines. What seems quite arbitrary is actually the result of a very deliberate decision by the painter: quickly drawn line formations and systematically arranged colour forms, free improvisation and a strong picture construction.
The work is one of the earliest of Nay’s disc paintings, which include Chromatische Scheiben (Chromatic Discs) from 1960 and which is also part of the Reinhard Ernst Collection. From 1954 to 1962, he explored the pictorial possibilities of this motif. His observation that the disc resulted from the elementary first blob of colour on the canvas would establish what is probably his best-known series of works. In the painting Frühe – Grün Weiß (Early – Green White), he combined the disc with other geometric forms in order to explore the compositional and colour possibilities. As of 1955/56, he discarded the angular forms entirely in favour of the round ones. The disc represented for Nay a completely natural, almost automatic form of painting since, as he explained, his hand automatically produced a circular movement.
Nay’s position within the German art scene after 1945 is evidenced not only in his numerous solo exhibitions, but also in his participation in a number of prominent postwar shows such as ‘Gegenstandslose Malerei in Deutschland’ (Non-Objective Painting in Germany) at the Kunsthalle Mannheim (1952), ‘Duitse kunst na 1945’ at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Stedelijk van Abbe Museum Eindhoven, and the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen (1954), and ‘Glanz und Gestalt – Ungegenständliche Kunst’ at the Museum Wiesbaden (1955).
