With his work “Aufleuchtend in Rot” (Glowing in Red) from 1960, Ernst Wilhelm Nay accomplished a particularly pronounced form of dissolution of the basic motif of the disk. By the mid-1950s, he had already detached himself from any representational reference with his “ Disk Paintings, taking the step into pure abstraction that would be so crucial to his work. However, as was so characteristic of his artistic development, he did not linger with a single stylistic device once he had established it. Still, he continued to evolve it, reflecting on its potential possibilities and drawing on a seemingly endless cosmos of forms and colors that would lead him to ever-new expressions of abstraction.

In favor of greater lightness and greater compositional freedom, he varies the circular basic form in “Aufleuchtend in Rot” to create a variety of color fields, most of them with jagged edges, without, however, obscuring the disk he considers so necessary. Warm red, orange, and yellow tones share the pictorial surface with cool white and blue nuances, surrounded only by isolated black and gray elements. In May 1960, the year “Aufleuchtend in Rot” was created, he wrote in a letter to art historian Werner Haftmann: “For the sake of the surface and to avoid figuration, the disk is occasionally strongly dissolved into the surface...” And two months later, in July 1960: “Thus, there are no limits to instinct. The image form never repeats itself; only the basic motif of the disc remains constant." (Ernst Wilhelm Nay, July 16, 1960, quoted from: Magdalena Claesges (ed.), E. W. Nay, Lesebuch, Cologne 2002, p. 196f.).

Nay's refinement of the disk form coincided with a period of great international attention for the artist. Werner Haftmann published his first comprehensive monograph in 1960, the Guggenheim Foundation in New York awarded him a prize, the Kunstmuseum in Basel presented a double retrospective together with Willi Baumeister, and his works were shown in a solo exhibition at the New London Gallery. At the end of the year, he wrote somewhat cautiously in a letter to art historian Erich Meyer: “The year 1960 was quite fortunate for me.” He recounts the events of the year, the very successful “exhibition in London, which had a wide impact,” successful book sales, and that “to top it all off [...] the Kunstmuseum in Basel purchased the blue painting ‘Ontario Blue’” from 1959 from the Documenta. A painting comparable to “Aufleuchtend in Rot” in terms of its stylistic features and a more liberal interpretation of the disk.


And yet, despite the tremendous success he enjoyed during this period, the artist still seemed to be primarily interested in painting: “I am excited about the next paintings and feel inspired to intensify my work.” And at the end of the letter, suffering from a slight cold: “Painting is the best remedy.” (Ernst Wilhelm Nay, letter to Erich Meyer, July 16, 1960, quoted from: Lesebuch, Cologne 2002, p. 199). His vibrant color composition “Aufleuchtend in Rot” exemplifies the stylistic diversity and liberated interplay of form and color within the important group of the Disk Paintings, on which Ernst Wilhelm Nay continued to work until 1962. [AR]