‘“Come dancing”, the village girls called to me in the evening, and I went down by the sea to dance on the green in the midnight sun … I can still see it all before me, the magic air, the quay, the landing ceremony, the anchors, the people … and then the sea, stretching without a break to the North pole … The big dynamic swings of the landscape, its elementary force brought the theme of my art out for the first time’ - Ernst Wilhelm Nay

Alive with glowing colour and joyful rhythmic vitality, Menschen in den Lofoten (People in the Lofoten) is a visionary work from Ernst Wilhelm Nay’s seminal early series of Lofoten-Bilder (Lofoten Pictures). Painted between 1937 and 1938, these works marked the pivotal culmination of his formative artistic principles, sowing the seeds for the vibrant, lyrical language that would eventually place him at the forefront of European abstraction. The paintings were based on watercolours that Nay made while staying on the Lofoten Islands: a majestic, peaceful archipelago off the northwest coast of Norway, where – at the invitation of Edvard Munch – he found a temporary escape from the economic and psychological hardships of Nazi Germany. There, his work had been oppressed by the Fascist regime, leading to his inclusion in the historic exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) in 1937. In the sweeping, dramatic vistas and idyllic village community of Lofoten, Nay allowed his creative instincts to roam free. According to Siegfried Rohr ‘the Lofoten paintings showed his creative powers reaching their first culmination … The rhythmic ordering of the surface anticipated the later so obvious affinity to music in Nay’s work, and the ecstatic mood of the figures showed him on a search for archetypal meaning, a solid humane ground in an increasingly inhumane world.’ Saturated with echoes of Munch’s Expressionistic language, as well as strains of Pablo Picasso, the present work captures the carefree joie de vivre of life on the islands, where Nay had danced beneath the midnight sun with the locals, and had stood upon misty harbours gazing out to the sea and mountains beyond. With its dynamic, elementary figures bathed in searing light, Menschen in den Lofoten represents a poignant expression of faith in humanity: an ode to the final days of beauty and revelry in a world poised on the brink of conflict.
Nay’s work had garnered early acclaim during the 1920s and 1930s, attracting the attention of the gallerist Günther Franke who championed other so-called ‘degenerate’ artists including Max Beckmann and Willi Baumeister. As Nazism took hold, however, Nay and his contemporaries became progressively isolated, banned from exhibiting or buying artistic materials. Concerned about Nay’s predicament, the German art historian Carl Georg Heise had written to Munch – by then in his seventies – who agreed to help the artist travel to Norway. Nay was greatly moved by their first meeting: ‘[he] played out everything the people in Europe are still dreaming of’, he recalled. The remote northern landscape, too – so evocatively conjured by Munch before him – made a lasting impact on his psyche. ‘I can still see it all before me,’ he recounted, ‘the magic air, the quay, the landing ceremony, the anchors, the people … and then the sea, stretching without a break to the North pole … The big dynamic swings of the landscape, its elementary force brought the theme of my art out for the first time’ (E. W. Nay, ‘Notes’, in E. W. Nay: A Retrospective, exh. cat., Cologne, Josef-Haubrich-Kunsthalle, 1990, pp. 30-31). Indeed, the resulting works have come to represent the foundation of Nay’s aesthetic, which – though increasingly abstract – would similarly embrace serial forms, saturated colour and a near-musical sense of rhythmic ecstasy. As figure and ground merge into electric unity, the present work offers a thrilling account of this genesis.