134 / 139
| 64
Impressionist & Modern Art
3258 ERNSTWILHELMNAY(Berlin 1902 - 1968 Cologne)
Das Duett. 1946.
Oil on canvas.
Signed and dated lower left: Nay 46.
56 x 79 cm.
Provenance:
- Galerie Günther Franke, Munich (1946).
- Private collection, Liechtenstein, bought
at the above gallery, since then remaining
in the same family.
Exhibition: Munich 1946, E. W. Nay, Galerie
Günther Franke, Pctober 1946, no. 17.
Literature: Scheibler, Aurel/Gohr, Siegfried:
Ernst WilhlemNay. Werkverzeichnis der
Ölgemälde. vol. 1 1922-1951, Cologne
1990, no. 346, p. 235 (with ill.).
Ernst WilhelmNay saw the end of the
Second World War not as the zero hour,
but as the longed-for liberation of painting
from the constraints it had to endure
during the Nazi dictatorship.
The so-called "Hekate pictures", created in
the mid to late 1940s, express the tragedy
and fears of the past and the emerging
hope of the beginning post-war period.
The painters long-standing friend Ernst
Gosebruch gave the name to the whole
group of works based on the pictures
"Daughter of Hekate" I and II. The figure of
the Hecate comes from pre-Greek cults
and is the goddess of death and the moon.
A daughter is not mentioned in the myths.
Nay has created this extension to symboli-
se the upheaval of the post-war era.
Even if these works seem to be partially
figur-ative, the painter is primarily con-
cerned with the shape of the colour itself,
in order to free painting from it. For him,
color is not a support, not at the service for
something, but shape itself.
In 1946, the Galerie Franke hosts the first
post-war exhibition of Nay's work in the
newly occupied Villa Stuck, where the offe-
red painting "Duett" is also shown.
At the opening, where the artist spoke in
public for the first time after the war, he
said:
"The demons are banished and over-
come by the order, the pictorial form, as
it presents itself not only as an aesthetic
event, but deeply bound as a life event. A
mild but strong fire burns, and painting is
saved from cliffs and abysses. Painting, i. e.
forming the picture out of colour, because
colour is the life of painting, an expression
of the originality that has been regained."
(Translated fromGerman: Scheibler, Aurel:
Ernst WilhelmNay. Catalogue raisonné of
oil paintings, Munich 1990, p. 224)
CHF 100 000 / 150 000
(€ 89 000 / 133 900)