Catalogue raisonné: Claesges 52-068

Ernst Wilhelm Nay – Untitled (1952)

“Colour for me is a formative value. I not only give colour priority over other pictorial means, but the entire artistic activity of my work is determined solely by coloured form.”
(Ernst Wilhelm Nay, 1952, in Das Kunstwerk, vol. 6, no. 2, p. 4)

A few years after the end of the Second World War, Ernst Wilhelm Nay moved from Hofheim in the Taunus to Cologne, where he made his decisive transition into abstraction. Amidst the ruins and rapid reconstruction of one of Germany’s most devastated cities, Nay experienced a renewed sense of artistic freedom, which profoundly shaped his work of the early 1950s.

The present sheet was created in 1952, the year in which Nay developed his seminal series of “Rhythmical Paintings” (1952/53), a key contribution to German post-war abstraction.

Colour as Autonomous Structure

In Untitled (1952), form is liberated from representational structure. Lines and contours overlap and dissolve into one another, accelerating across the surface and generating a pulsating rhythm. The composition avoids a fixed centre, unfolding instead as a dynamic interplay of movement and colour.

Musical influences — particularly the serial compositions of Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen — resonate in Nay’s increasingly rapid and energetic brushwork. Painting becomes a visual equivalent of rhythm and tonal variation.

Movement, Gesture and Chromatic Energy

The dense ink of the left half of the sheet extends across the composition, gradually shifting in intensity and character. As its opacity diminishes, it gains speed towards the right, where swift, frayed fields of red watercolour intensify the sense of motion.

Despite the restraint to earth-bound tones, the work radiates remarkable luminosity. The varying transparency of the pigments produces depth and tension without recourse to traditional perspective.

The viewer’s eye moves freely between the saturated ink and the translucent watercolour passages, navigating the surface without prescribed direction. In this openness lies the essence of Nay’s artistic vision: Untitled embodies the spirit of freedom that defined the development of abstract art in post-war Germany.