Hofheim am Taunus / The designation "Hekate-Pictures
The designation "Hekate Pictures" came into existence at a much later point, recalls Elisabeth Nay-Scheibler. In 1950/51, when Nay was already turning to new themes, to the fugal pictorial forms, his good friend and mentor Ernst Gosebruch, long-time director of the Museum Folkwang in Essen who was dismissed from his post by the National Socialists in 1933, visited him. He inquired about the paintings he had previously created in Hofheim, of which he remembered only one title: "Tochter der Hekate" (Daughter of Hecate). This way the denomination of the stylistic period of the years 1945 to 1948 came about in passing.

After the end of the war, which Ernst Wilhelm Nay spent as a cartographer in France, he did not return to Berlin, but to the idyllic town of Hofheim am Taunus. Through the mediation of the artist and gallery owner Hanna Bekker vom Rath, he moved into the abandoned studio of Ottilie Roederstein, a German-Swiss painter who died in Hofheim in 1937. The paintings that Nay created there during the six years he stayed, are filled with fierce and burning colors. A pictorial language borne entirely by color, which at first remained committed to figuration, culminated in the so-called ‘Hekate Pictures’ in 1945-1948, a creative period inspired by an ancient myth. The starting point of the ‘Hekate’ phase were pictures dominated by a figure or a pair of figures, whereby Nay certainly found certain orientation with Picasso's cubist human type of the 1930s and early 1940s. In a letter to his friend and collector Erich Meyer from December 28, 1945, he describes the activation of pictorial space through color as the goal of his artistic work: "My pictures have a multitude of very strong colors and they are painted with a maximum degree of painterly freedom. I am just about to take yet another leap forward. Colorful dynamics, surface rhythm, ornament and relief, these have so far been my means of creating the space of painting. For this reason I have been extremely careful about - as it is also the spirit of my art, which now emphasizes the magical, the enchanting more than ever before - depicting spatial depths with these means. That shall happen now." (quoted from: E. W. Nay 1902-1968. Bilder und Dokumente, Munich 1980, p. 90)

Unusual color mixtures emerge and deepen a highly differentiated coloration
For Nay, the preoccupation with an abstractly structured surface fabric is a logical consequence after the ever-increasing condensation of figurative pictorial structures in the "Hekate Pictures". Part of this consideration is to design that "complex of primal forms in connection with rhythm and dynamics" as open as possible so that, according to Nay, "the actual formal theme of my art can develop as a whole" (quoted from: ex. cat. E. W. Nay 1902-1968. Bilder und Dokumente, Nuremberg and Munich 1980, p. 62). With the exception of the surreal landscapes, the first truly Nayian pictorial theme, Nay's artistic development was basically always underpinned by rhythm and dynamism, for example from the clearly structured "Fishermen- " and "Lofoten-Pictures", which represent a simplified representationalism, to the "Hekate-Pictures", abstractly structured works that still show notions of figuration characteristic of the compositions created in France. Here one encounters the meanwhile catchy form and figuration typical of Nay's iconography, with which Nay strove, as Werner Haftmann so fittingly describes, to "factually disassemble the individual color surfaces, to isolate and work through them as individual qualities and to clearly define them as independent elements of the spatial plan order, but also as isolated color voices" (Werner Haftmann, E. W. Nay, Cologne 1991, p. 153). In a figurative sense, Nay's "Hekate-Pictures" of the first years after the war can be understood as works in which he gives expression to gloomy memories in formal terms, while his titles give the observer a little insight into the mysterious process of the artistic activity. Thus the artist replaced the figurative inventions from the time in France with themes from literature, Greek mythology and the Old Testament. The titles, mostly given only after Nay had completed the painting, now read: 'Annunciation', 'Paolo and Francesca', 'Daughter of Hecate', 'Sitting before the Mirror', 'Sibyl', 'Oberon, 'Salome', 'Eurydice', 'Shepherd', 'Autumn Song', 'Kythera' and 'Lot's Wife' or, as here, 'Himmlische Botschaft' (Heavenly Message), The formal vocabulary of circle, spindle, checkerboard, and hands that is recurrent in Nay's paintings is visibly interwoven with mostly coded figure and landscape associations in the "Hekate-Pictures." In addition, meaningful names give the "Hekate-Pictures" a mythical sound. And this sound is supported by a sophisticated expansion of the palette. Color mixtures that had never been used before appear: white, lemon yellow, ocher, brown, dark brown, orange, light red, dark red, light blue, dark blue, light green, dark green, light gray, and black. The surface and depth of the coloration open up a rich, highly differentiated spectrum. The application of paint, here and there slightly impasto, reinforces a peculiarly precious relief effect, as if we were dealing with highly alien entities. By stretching the forms, Nay fosters a two-dimensional tension, raises the weight-bearing capacity, and increases the tempo.

The painting "Himmlische Botschaft" is a picture painted entirely out of the color. For observers familiar with Nay's vocabulary of forms, the details reveal a fan-shaped hand, open eyes pointing to a face, in the center below, two rounded forms side by side, evoking the back view of a figure? A vocabulary that already includes circular and spindle shapes so characteristic of Nay's later 'Disk-' and 'Eye Pictures'. [MvL]