Ernst Wilhelm Nay's path to pure abstraction: The Disk Paintings
Ernst Wilhelm Nay's Disk Paintings epitomize pure abstraction, marking the pinnacle of the artist's work after the end of World War II.
Shortly after returning from military deployment in France, Nay gradually abandoned figurative art. After his studio in Berlin was destroyed in a bomb attack, painter and collector Hanna Bekker vom Rath, who had already made a significant contribution to the protection of modern art during the war, helped him find a new studio in the Taunus region near Frankfurt am Main. It was in this protected space that he created the so-called “Hekate Paintings” between 1945 and 1948, heralding the critical transition from figurative to abstract painting in his oeuvre. With these paintings, as Elisabeth Nay-Scheibler described them, Ernst Wilhelm Nay processed his war experiences and also looked ahead to what the promising post-war period would bring. Elisabeth Nay-Scheibler in: Aurel Scheibler, Siegfried Gohr, Ernst Wilhelm Nay. Catalogue Raisonné of Oil Paintings, Vol. 1: 1922-1951, Cologne 1990, p. 224).


In the winter of 1951, Ernst Wilhelm Nay left his Taunus studio in Hofheim and moved to Cologne. The artist moved into an attic apartment in the Braunsfeld district of the city on the Rhine, where he set up a large studio. Even though Cologne, like so many German cities, was still suffering from the aftermath of the war, there was a completely new and positive attitude towards life, much more so than in the tranquil countryside around Hofheim. A dynamic spirit of optimism was palpable, which quickly rubbed off on the artist and inspired him to create a new group of works, the “Rhythmic Pictures” (1952/53). In these works, Nay completed his transition to abstract painting. The color broke away from earlier representational references and covered the canvas in rhythmically structured forms.


With his Disk series, Ernst Wilhelm Nay finally moved beyond angular forms and any representational associations in the mid-1950s. His compositions began to float and flow across the canvas. For the artist himself, this was a completely natural and logical development. When asked how he came up with the disk, he replied that, for him, the natural spread of color in the painting process is a circle. “My disk idea was initially entirely artistic in nature. If the composer is a composer of music, I wanted to be a composer of color, using the means of color in connection with rhythm, quanta, dynamics, and sequences to create a surface.” (quoted from: Exhibition catalog Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, April 30–June 10, 1998, among others, p. 99) This insight helped him achieve the simplification he sought in his art. Suddenly, color, completely liberated from figure and form, became the sole vehicle of expression.

Although Ernst Wilhelm Nay's artistic development, closely interwoven with his biography, may seem logical and compelling from today's perspective, his path to the pure abstraction of the disk painting is an exceptional example of artistic consistency for its time. Nay's tireless search for a painterly form of expression and his courage to pursue his own visions, away from norms and traditions, ultimately paved the way for a radically new understanding of art.



“Helle Chromatik” (Bright Chromaticism) – Perfect color harmony with maximum expressiveness
Ernst Wilhelm Nay's work “Helle Chromatik” shows the disk image in its purest form. It was created in 1962 and is one of the later works within the group. In January of the year it was made, Nay traveled to New York for a solo exhibition at the Knoedler Gallery, while the Folkwang Museum in Essen presented a major retrospective on the occasion of his 60th birthday. By this time, his art had gained international recognition. In the USA, he met painters such as Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko. As early as 1958, he wrote confidently about the development of painting and the formation of a new, transnational, sensual and influential art: “Malevich, Kandinsky, Rothko, Tobey, Pollock, Nay. These are some of the artists who produce this universal art.” (Magdalena Claesges (ed.), E. W. Nay, Lesebuch, Cologne 2002, p. 187). It almost seems as if he manifested his acceptance into the international elite of abstraction. In the years that followed, Nay's formats became strikingly larger, the forms more expressive, and the lines more assertive.


In “Helle Chromatik", the composition lives solely from the colored bodies that float on different pictorial planes. The artist altogether dispensed with linear design elements found in earlier works from this series. The densely packed circles from the early days have given way to a looser, lighter arrangement. Against the radiant white of the primed canvas, disks of mostly equal size in pure, bright colors meet, overlap, and fill the entire surface of the painting in a cheerful interplay. It is one of the disk paintings in which the overwhelming power of reduced form and absolute color intensity collide unhindered. The disks are unusually large, and their number is significantly reduced compared to other works of such an impressive format. Their circular borders are not always completely closed, and the interior of some disks is merely filled with parallel brushstrokes. Some may already recognize the first signs of the subsequent “Eye Pictures” (1963–1964) in this, which Nay would soon develop based on the crossed-out disk. Regardless of stylistic subtleties, however, Nay’s “Helle Chromatik” is, above all, a spectacular display of the disk—a perfect color ambiance with the utmost expressiveness. [AR]