Lot 344 D

“Adam und Eva” was one of the few oil paintings Nay created during the War years, when he was stationed first in the South of France, then in Brittany.
“'Those paintings made during the war' Nay wrote in his exhibition regesta - 'were actually unique to my oeuvre. They had arisen out of personal experiences that I clung to because I could not understand everything else, a constellation that never otherwise occurred in my art.' The beauty of the country he had never seen before, encountering its people, and the close love relationship with a French woman had as lasting an effect on Nay as did the threat of war and dictatorship. The ambivalence of the exhilarating and distressing experiences he made simultaneously find their expression in his artistic production of those years.” (E. Nay-Scheibler, in: Aurel Scheibler, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, catalogue of works in oil, Cologne 1990, vol. I, p. 198).
In terms of theme, the present painting belongs to a small group of paintings which with “Herbst” (Autumn), “Paar im Herbst” (Couple in Autumn), and “Apfelernte” (Apple Harvest) provide variations on a timeless topic. Nay may have experienced this personally and directly in France as a pacific, pastoral life. In the close-up framing of “Adam und Eva,” focused on the couple and the tree crown, the theme is interpreted as a portrayal of the Garden of Eden. The warm colour scheme of these paintings, in which Nay employed bright yellow and red hues for the first time, is of note. Figurative allusions such as ladders, wooden or wire fences, are reduced to symbols and form new abstract spatial patterns within the composition. Nay was at the time forced to test his “new visual concepts” above all in numerous small works on paper, drawings and watercolours (E. Nay-Scheibler, op. cit., p. 198).