"Seraphim", Ernst Wilhelm Nay, 1964
Ernst Wilhelm Nay (German, 1902-1968)
Oil on canvas, 162 x 150.7 cm.
Credit Line: Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of the Acquisitions Committee of the Friends of the Busch-Reisinger Museum on the occasion of the 100th Anniversary of the Museum.
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By the late 1950s and early ’60s, abstraction dominated the artistic landscape in West Germany; it was often polemically aligned with democratic principles, in opposition to the state-imposed realism of both the Nazi era and contemporary East Germany. In 1959, at the second documenta, a major exhibition of modern and contemporary art, a large painting by Nay presided over one of two main exhibition spaces, while the work of Jackson Pollock filled the other. The so-called “American invasion” by abstract expressionists that year had a lasting effect on the development of postwar German art. Although Nay omitted all figurative references from his work in the 1950s, his series of paintings from 1963–65, dubbed “Eye Pictures,” features large circular shapes rendered in distinct color contrasts.
-Harvard Art Museum
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Source and download: https://hvrd.art/o/73715