Ernst Wilhelm Nay

Combining a highly expressive graphic style and a deep sensitivity to colour, Ernst Wilhelm Nay’s intense painting is surveyed in this first English-language overview of his varied life and career.

For Ernst Wilhelm Nay (1902–68), painting was an entrance to a world beyond the visible, a world more real and more vital that lay beneath the surface of appearances.

Beginning his career as the chaotic years of the Weimar Republic became the dark years of the Third Reich, it was natural that he should look to art for an alternative reality. One of Germany’s most important abstract painters, this fully illustrated publication offers a fresh approach to the Nay’s work.

This comprehensive monograph is accompanied by an overview of his life and work by John-Paul Stonard and in-depth history of Nay’s reception in Britain and the United States by Dr Pamela Kort, and a foreword by Sir Norman Rosenthal.