Lot 770 D

Oil on canvas 50 x 33 cm, framed. Signed and dated lower left 'NAY 48'. The reverse signed and dated 'NAY - WALDGEIST'. - Minor craquelure.

Scheibler 405

With accompanying photo certificate from Elisabeth Nay-Scheibler, dated 26.5.1998 (copy).

Provenance:
Private Ownership, Wiesbaden; Private Ownership, Germany

Exhibitions:
Wiesbaden 1957 (Nassauischer Kunstverein im Städtischen Museum - Gemäldegalerie), Moderne Kunst aus Wiesbadener Privatbesitz, exhib.cat.no.128
Berlin 1948 (Galerie Franz), Ernst Wilhelm Nay, exhib.cat.no.22 with ill.

„At the point in time when Europe and its traditions had reached their nadir, Nay invoked the forces of the unconscious, which, beyond all destruction and cruelty, could provide a basis for the recovery of human dignity out of a fundamental trust in oneself and one's fellow men. Yet by lending this idea a touch of the bizarre and fantastic, Nay made it clear that his was no naive belief in redemption of the kind that was then so widespread, and he did more justice to the complex interrelationship of death and rebirth in human nature than any merely rationalistic social theory could ever do. In the subsequent years Nay proved that he had the power to draw creative energies from the confused and ambivalent situation of the postwar years. Thanks to his profound research into the meanings of motifs and colours, he remained by the fashionable abstract or modernistic tendencies that proved so disastrous for many German artists after the war. His rigorous concept of painting and integrity of his artistic decisions provided a foundation on which to build an abstraction that never divorced itself from the things of life. As the tremor which went through his work with the Fugal compositions and particularly with the rhythmic works of the early 1950s indicates, Nay could devote himself entirely to the present, […].“Siegfried Gohr, Ernst Wilhlem Nay, Der Beteiligte, Unbeteiligte, in: Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Retrospektive, exhib.cat. Josef-Haubrich- Kunsthalle Cologne a.o., Cologne 1990, p.15/16).