Lot 771 R

Oil on canvas 162 x 130 cm, framed. The stretcher signed, dated and titled 'NAY - CRESCENDO - 1963'. - Minor traces of age.

Scheibler 1074 (here erroneously titled "Creszendo"; ill. upside down)

Provenance: Galerie Neher, Essen; Siggi and Sissy Loch Charitable Foundation

Exhibitions: Bremen 2007 (Weserburg Museum für Moderne Kunst), Paint it Blue, ACT Art Collection Siegfried Loch, exhib.cat., p.19 with col.ill.

Essen 1987 (Galerie Neher), Blickpunkte Deutsche Kunst im 20. Jahrhundert nach 1950, exhib.cat., Vol.II, p.82/83 with col.ill.

“Crescendo” is among the works of Ernst Wilhelm Nay in which the expressive gestures of the lineament have already superimposed themselves over the disc theme. It is therefore appropriate that the artist should have called this painting “Crescendo”, a musical term describing the gradual transition from piano to forte and thus an increase in volume.

The artist wrote around 1962/1963: “Absolute painting is a victory of our time and cannot be destroyed by anything. Absolute painting is an expression of the self-fulfilment of modern man. It is associated with cosmic elements in the symbolic form of discs and also engrammes as subconsciously created signs. […] Absolute painting as an expression of man's unfettered and uncontained freedom, the freedom to achieve self-realisation - this is one of the epochal victories of our present day.”
Nay noted on 27 July 1963: “I've been painting with chromatic discs since 1954. The purpose was to find a typesetting method for painting, a rule-based method for arranging painted colours in the same way that notes are lined up in music, whether classical or modern. What followed was indeed something akin to the serial production of notes. This formal theme of my art […] could not be encapsulated in a law of logic. Logic would have channelled it in a different direction so that it would have died within itself. Once the potential compendium was sufficiently secure, after years of work, I broke out of it when I combined this disc technique - this typesetting technique for discs - with free, absolute painting in the form of free inventions, and it enabled me to re-insert passion and suffering again, yet without art remaining condemned to artificiality.” (Ernst Wilhelm Nay, in: E.W. Nay, Lesebuch, Selbstzeugnisse und Schriften 1931-1968, Cologne 2002, p.235 and 239)