Ernst Wilhelm Nay and André Masson. Myth and massacre

About

The exhibition in the Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection is dedicated for the first time to the artistic relationship between the French surrealist André Masson and the Berliner Ernst Wilhelm Nay, whose art became the figurehead of abstract modernism in post-war West Germany.

In 1931, André Masson's (1896-1987) large-format painting “Massacre”, which is the starting point of the exhibition, was created. A year later it was published in large format by Christian Zervos in the magazine “Cahiers d'art”. On a formal level, this image, as well as a number of other paintings and drawings by Masson from the same period, bear striking similarities to works by Ernst Wilhelm Nay (1902-1968) from the 1940s.

In terms of content, Ernst Wilhelm Nay and André Masson, who have never met each other in person, take largely opposite positions: While Masson's works focus on the memory of the horrors of the First World War, the young soldier Nay creates a mythological alternative world to the catastrophe of the Second World War World War. Analytical Cubism, developed by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Georges Braque (1882-1963) between 1909 and 1912, and “automatic writing” (“écriture automatique”), which was first propagated by the Surrealists around André Breton in the early 1920s. were the model for this new design language. In the 1940s and 1950s it was also used by artists such as Asger Jorn (1914-1973), Georg Meistermann (1911-1990) and Theodor Werner (1886-1969).
 
A total of around 70 works will be shown.