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Lot Essay
Grosse Sitzende mit Spiegel (Large Seated Woman with Mirror) is one of the most important paintings in Nay's highly acclaimed Hekate series (see fig.1). The Hekate pictures were painted in Hofheim between 1945 and 1948 and represent Nay's exploration of what he called a "mythical/magical world" of the unconscious and the primordial.
Grosse Sitzende mit Spiegel is the culmination of two years work on the same theme and an outstanding example of the new style that Nay achieved with the Hekate works. He quite probably based the subject on Picasso's Girl with Mirror, 1937, and reworked the image several times in ink, gouache and oil in a remarkable series of pictures. Here he experimented with both the colour and the thickness of the abstracted forms to give a marvelous sense of play and rhythm to the image. In particular, one notices in the 1947 works Nay's increasing use of black dots to enhance the sense of spatial ambiguity and rhythm to create a cascade of form. In this, the final work on the theme, the use of black dots has been refined from the earlier studies to create a patterning that gives an elegant tension to the picture that perhaps points towards his later use of the dot and the sphere in his Scheibenbilder (Disk pictures) of the 1960s.
The title of the series comes from the name given by Nay's close friend, Ernst Gosebruch in 1948 to a picture in the series, Tochter der Hekate I. Werner Haftmann has explained the appropriateness of using Hecate, the ancient goddess of the underworld, as the title of the series: "the name Hecate stands for this descent into a region where the roots of all living things meet and mingle... . At the point in time when Europe and its traditions had reached their nadir, Nay invoked the forces of the unconscious, which beyond all destruction and cruelty could provide a basis for the recovery of human dignity out of a fundamental trust in oneself and one's fellow men."
Although the Hekate pictures are collectively known under a mythological title, the title refers more to Nay's way of working from the unconscious at this time than to any of the figures represented in the paintings themselves. The importance of these works lies purely in their painterly quality and not with any mythological significance. They are, as Nay himself referred to them late in life, purely "pictures in very thick paint that grow more beautiful from year to year as they grow older."
Grosse Sitzende mit Spiegel is the culmination of two years work on the same theme and an outstanding example of the new style that Nay achieved with the Hekate works. He quite probably based the subject on Picasso's Girl with Mirror, 1937, and reworked the image several times in ink, gouache and oil in a remarkable series of pictures. Here he experimented with both the colour and the thickness of the abstracted forms to give a marvelous sense of play and rhythm to the image. In particular, one notices in the 1947 works Nay's increasing use of black dots to enhance the sense of spatial ambiguity and rhythm to create a cascade of form. In this, the final work on the theme, the use of black dots has been refined from the earlier studies to create a patterning that gives an elegant tension to the picture that perhaps points towards his later use of the dot and the sphere in his Scheibenbilder (Disk pictures) of the 1960s.
The title of the series comes from the name given by Nay's close friend, Ernst Gosebruch in 1948 to a picture in the series, Tochter der Hekate I. Werner Haftmann has explained the appropriateness of using Hecate, the ancient goddess of the underworld, as the title of the series: "the name Hecate stands for this descent into a region where the roots of all living things meet and mingle... . At the point in time when Europe and its traditions had reached their nadir, Nay invoked the forces of the unconscious, which beyond all destruction and cruelty could provide a basis for the recovery of human dignity out of a fundamental trust in oneself and one's fellow men."
Although the Hekate pictures are collectively known under a mythological title, the title refers more to Nay's way of working from the unconscious at this time than to any of the figures represented in the paintings themselves. The importance of these works lies purely in their painterly quality and not with any mythological significance. They are, as Nay himself referred to them late in life, purely "pictures in very thick paint that grow more beautiful from year to year as they grow older."