Ernst Wilhelm Nay

Red in the Centre

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Ernst Wilhelm Nay, 1902–68
Red in the Center (1955)
Oil on Canvas
100 x 160 cm
Acquired by Bayer in 1980

Ernst Wilhelm Nay’s work is many-sided and cannot be assigned to any major trend in art. Nay, who hailed from Berlin, played a substantial role in establishing modern art in Germany after World War II.
He graduated in 1928 from the painting class of the School of Visual Arts in Berlin, where he was a master pupil of the Expressionist painter Karl Hofer. Hofer’s influence on Nay’s early pictures is unmistakable. His paintings were mainly representational, but occasionally surreal. During summer sojourns by the Baltic Sea in Pomerania he produced the cycle Pictures of Dunes and Fishermen.

The National Socialists banned Nay’s work. In 1937 they showed two of his paintings in the Degenerate Art exhibition. That same year Nay travelled to the Lofoten Islands with financial support from the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch. Nay painted numerous watercolors on the islands. Later, in his studio in Berlin, he produced the Lofoten Pictures, one of the first highlights of his oeuvre. In World War II, Nay had to join the Wehrmacht, where he served among other things as a cartographer.

After the war, a new creative phase began for him, one in which he painted, inter alia, his Fugal Pictures and Rhythmic Pictures. Characteristic of his style were an abstract play of colours and the rhythmic composition of the pictorial elements. Red in the Centre is one of the series of Disk Pictures that Nay painted in the 1950s. Representation disappeared almost entirely from his work, featuring at most as ornamentation, for example in the Eye Pictures he painted in the 1960s.