Private Collection / Galerie Orangerie-Reinz, Cologne (1991) / formerly Private Collection, Hesse

Doris Schmid, in: E. W. Nay. Bilder aus den Jahren 1935-1968. Bonn 1970, unpaginated / Weltkunst, vol 60, issue 22, Munich, 15.11.1990, cover ill. / Magdalene Claesges: Die Geburt des elementaren Bildes aus dem Geist der Abstraktion: Versuch einer Deutung der theoretischen Schriften von Ernst Wilhelm Nay. Cologne, Univ. Diss., 2001, p. 190, ill. 64

The blue is as blue as the sea in the south of France, the yellow as yellow as ripe lemons, and the orange matches that of mandarins. We know from his letters and notes how much it mattered to Ernst Wilhelm Nay that the colours in his paintings should glow, and in this picture they truly do so most beautifully. The artist must have felt the same, since he named the picture after them: "Gelb-Orange-Kobalt" (Yellow-Orange-Cobalt). At 65, Nay was at the height of his artistic career. Honoured and recognised internationally, he no longer needed to search, to borrow Picasso's words. He only found: the forms, the colour harmonies, the clarity and the magically floating quality of the composition. The painting "Gelb-Orange-Kobalt I" has all of this in abundance. It is a masterpiece that betrays nothing of the effort it cost him.
In a letter to Jane Sabersky, who as a confidante of Alfred Barr played a central role in the New York art scene for decades, Nay wrote about his work in January 1967: "For one thing, I am driven – and this is given by my nature – by a manic urge to paint. I need painting in order to maintain a certain balance […]. The eccentric and the quiet lie far apart in me" (quoted in: E. W. Nay: Lesebuch. Selbstzeugnisse und Schriften 1931–1968, Cologne 2002, p. 283). Ernst Wilhelm Nay may at times have had a slight tendency to brood, but from the way he speaks about his work here, one would not believe that shortly afterwards he would put a picture like "Gelb-Orange-Kobalt I" on canvas. Ulrich Clewing