The Artist’s Studio: E. W. Nay

2012 / 53 min. / color
Directed by Michael Blackwood

A visit to the studio of Ernst Wilhelm Nay, a remarkable, if somewhat solitary German artist, who had established his own position at age 30 among the many ‘isms’ of the time, just before the advent of the Nazi takeover. Soon his art was labeled “decadent” by the Hitler regime. His paintings were removed from museum collections, he could no longer show new work in galleries, or even purchase art supplies.

Soon after the end of WWII, Nay, by now 43 years old, returned to painting much inspired by his need ‘to catch up’. Once his work could be followed again year by year after 1946, he rose to become one of Germany’s leading painters. Somehow though the importance and range of his work has not fully entered the contemporary consciousness of the art world. This may partly be due to the fact that Nay belonged to that persecuted generation of German artists who, just as their work began to blossom, were forced by Hitler’s art dictatorship to go underground. There they had to continue, under the harshest circumstances and in complete isolation, what they had begun earlier.

Ernst Wilhelm Nay died in 1968 at the age of 65. His studio, still intact, offers a retrospective of his work beginning with the 1920s.