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Lot Essay
Schwarze Dominante is one of the earliest of Nay's celebrated Scheibenbilder (Disc pictures), the series which dominated his oeuvre for over eight years between 1954 and 1962. Painted in 1955, it shows Nay, having just discovered the motif of the disc, experimenting with what he called 'surface tensions' created by this new device. Nay's famous statement that he wished to paint like 'corrugated iron' is best explained by this description of his working method in the early disc paintings such as Schwarze Dominante:
"If I set a coloured dot on an empty surface an astonishing number of tensions were created. If I spread out the dot, the tensions increased. A second such disc, a third, a fourth - all the same size, already created a highly complicated formal relation. A number of colours also emerged if I made each disc a different colour, they could be regarded as a different chromatic sequence. The spaces between created forms and could be developed quite mechanically with the same colours in a specific alteration, creating a corrugated surface so that interlinking resulted ... This way of experimenting with a pictorial whole enabled endless variations, but it also concealed an immense danger to my own soul which blazed out often enough. The monomania could be intensified to pathological proportions. It would have been quite inconceivable to surrender all that; one would have robbed the driving force of all tension and no pictures would have resulted." (Ex. Cat. Nay Retrospektive, Cologne, 1991, pp. 36-37).
"If I set a coloured dot on an empty surface an astonishing number of tensions were created. If I spread out the dot, the tensions increased. A second such disc, a third, a fourth - all the same size, already created a highly complicated formal relation. A number of colours also emerged if I made each disc a different colour, they could be regarded as a different chromatic sequence. The spaces between created forms and could be developed quite mechanically with the same colours in a specific alteration, creating a corrugated surface so that interlinking resulted ... This way of experimenting with a pictorial whole enabled endless variations, but it also concealed an immense danger to my own soul which blazed out often enough. The monomania could be intensified to pathological proportions. It would have been quite inconceivable to surrender all that; one would have robbed the driving force of all tension and no pictures would have resulted." (Ex. Cat. Nay Retrospektive, Cologne, 1991, pp. 36-37).