Ernst Wilhelm Nay valuation
Laid colour down as discs across the canvas, and built a whole late career out of the device.
Ernst Wilhelm Nay was born in Berlin in 1902 and studied under Karl Hofer.
What a work by Ernst Wilhelm Nay is worth
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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.
Bornholm, Villa Massimo and the German pavilion
After a first trip to Paris, Nay received a scholarship from the art historian Georg Carl Heise in 1930 to work on Bornholm, where he painted his beach pictures, and in 1931 the Villa Massimo fellowship in Rome. In 1942 the army moved him to Le Mans as a map-maker. The Hekate pictures of 1945 to 1949 were followed by the Fugal pictures of 1949 to 1951.
In 1955 he published his manifesto Vom Gestaltwert der Farbe, on the formal value of colour, and had his first solo exhibition in the United States; the next year he had a solo exhibition in the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale. His widow, Elisabeth Nay-Scheibler, wrote the introductions to the phases of his work in the catalogue raisonné of the oil paintings.
Pforta, Hofheim and the documenta ceiling
Nay left the Landesschule Pforta in 1921 and gave up a bookshop apprenticeship in Berlin after a year. In 1924 he took three paintings he had taught himself to make to Karl Hofer, who gave him a scholarship and a place in his class, and at the college he met Elly Kirchner, a model there, whom he married in 1932. In 1933 the Völkischer Beobachter mocked his Liebespaar as a masterpiece of vulgarity. Summers on the Baltic at Vietzkerstrand in 1935 and 1936 produced the dune and fisherman pictures, and the Lofoten pictures were painted back in the Berlin studio from the watercolours he made in Norway.
A bomb destroyed his Berlin flat and studio in 1943, and after the war the collector and dealer Hanna Bekker vom Rath found him a small studio house at Hofheim am Taunus. In 1949 he married Elisabeth Kerschbaumer, assistant to his Munich dealer Günther Franke, and the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hanover gave him his first retrospective in 1950. In 1953 he drew an abstract film with Jean Cocteau, Gino Severini and Hans Erni, and in 1956 he painted the Freiburger Bild, 2.55 by 6.55 metres, for the Chemistry Institute of the University of Freiburg. At Arnold Bode's suggestion he painted three canvases four metres square for the ceiling at documenta III in 1964; they caused a public row and are now on permanent loan to the Federal Chancellery in Berlin.
Best auction results
- Scheiben und Halbscheiben €2.3m
- Oil on canvas, 1955 · Munich · 9 December 2017
- Publicly reported
- One of the first disc paintings, bought for the Pelikan collection in Hanover the year it was painted.
- Chromatische Scheiben €985,000
- Oil on canvas, 1960 · Berlin · 30 November 2017
- Publicly reported
- A large disc painting, almost 3.4 metres wide.
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
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.
