In the German lessons of the 1970s, the works of Ernst Wilhelm Nay were popular templates for picture descriptions.
On the one hand, they were representational - fishing boats, flowers, butterflies - but on the other hand they were abstract enough to draw the students' attention to the formal properties of the picture, its structure and color scheme.
Today the work of Nay, who was a leading representative of West German modernism in the international art world after the Second World War, is known almost exclusively to connoisseurs.
That's a pity, because the colorful paintings are among the most beautiful that classical modernism has produced on the way to abstraction.
An excellent show at the Hamburger Kunsthalle now offers the opportunity to rediscover Nay.
With around 120 paintings, watercolors and drawings - including twenty works from the company's own collection - the retrospective spans all phases of the artist's work from the end of the First World War to Nay's death in 1968. The show is structured chronologically, but the curator Karin Schick had a good idea , to incorporate “leaps in time”: individual images that break through chronological sequences and show the threads that link images from different periods as a forward or backward step.
Nay's work, which brackets the art movements before and after the Second World War, takes you on a long and eventful journey from representationalism to abstraction.
It begins with pictures, some of which are reminiscent of his teacher Carl Hofer with their muted colors and earthy appearance, others reveal the influence of Henri Matisse.
The first pictures that appear typical of his work today are fishing motifs that Nay painted in the thirties on the German Baltic Sea coast: the ups and downs of the surf are translated here into wild jagged areas of color between which the template-like figures of the fisherman have to assert themselves.
In the Lofoten pictures painted a short time later - Edvard Munch had donated Nay the trip to the Norwegian islands - the people disappear even more strongly in a sharp-edged, abstract painted nature.
When these paintings were created, Nay was stigmatized as a "degenerate" artist, but received painting materials and grants as a member of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts.
In 1939 he was rehabilitated by the Reich Chamber.
In this post he found time for his work in the middle of the war;
French art lovers provided the painting occupation soldier with a studio, paint and canvas.
He sent his pictures by field post.
An essay in the catalogue, which is well worth reading, sheds light on these ambivalences in an artist's existence between ostracism and assimilation.
In Le Mans in 1943 he created the "Composition with Four Women", a dreamy-looking, kaleidoscopic composition of female faces and bodies, which he later described as "the artistic manifestation of my being and the first grand-sounding and comprehensive work".
Despite the contacts and his close ties to French art, Nay remained almost unknown in France, while after 1945 he celebrated great success in other European countries and the USA.
Swinging pictures in the fifties
A highlight is the "Melodik der Farben" room, where large-format pictures from the 1950s with titles such as "Swing", "Serenade" or "Instrumentation" visualize rhythms and dance in a thrilling way through dynamic forms and bright colors.
Nay's deep interest in contemporary music, which had a center in Cologne, where he lived at the time, is evident here.
The traces of representationalism that can still be found in some of these works have disappeared in the "Disk Pictures", which are reminiscent of star constellations or carpets of flowers.
But in the late phase of his work it returns in a rudimentary form as a cipher of seeing: the panes become eyes – the image looked at looks at the viewer.
In the 1950s and 1960s, when these pictures were taken,
In the last years of his life his status as a painter star began to falter.
The following generation with Joseph Beuys or Konrad Klapheck viewed his work with distance.
Three large-format paintings that Nay created for Documenta III in 1963 and which hung on the ceiling there triggered a public discussion about him as a representative artist.
His painting was now accused of being decorative without content.
Behind this was resentment, but also a developing zeitgeist: the 1968 movement, which was supposed to champion the “social relevance” of art, threw its shadow ahead.
Those struggles are history, but the politicization of art has returned under the auspices of "cultural identity" and post-colonialism.
The magic that comes from pictures
Ernst Wilhelm Nay. retrospective
.
At the Kunsthalle Hamburg;
until August 7th.
Then in Wiesbaden and Duisburg.
The catalog costs 29 euros in the museum and 34 euros in bookstores.