Ernst Wilhelm Nay valuation
Laid colour down as discs across the canvas, and built a whole late career out of the device.
What a work by Ernst Wilhelm Nay is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
Ernst Wilhelm Nay was born in Berlin in 1902 and studied under Karl Hofer. Early success was interrupted in 1937, when his work was declared degenerate and removed from German museums; Edvard Munch, who had seen the paintings, paid for him to work in the Lofoten Islands, and the pictures made there are among the best of the early output. He served in France during the war, painting in a friend's studio when off duty, and settled in Cologne afterwards. The Hekate pictures of the late 1940s gave way in the mid-1950s to the Scheibenbilder, in which colour is set down as discs across the surface and the composition is built from their intervals. He showed at the first three documenta exhibitions, represented Germany at Venice, and died in Cologne in 1968.
Oils lead, and the period of a picture governs the discussion, because the phases — the early figurative work, Hekate, the disc paintings, the late Augenbilder — are separate bodies rather than variations on one. Watercolours, gouaches and drawings are plentiful and prints less so. The Ernst Wilhelm Nay Stiftung in Cologne maintains the catalogue raisonné begun by Aurel Scheibler and gives opinions, and registration with it is the normal expectation. The disc paintings carry substantial impasto, so cracking, flaking and earlier retouching are what a condition report is looking for.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
