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Presentation of the relief package in the Chancellery: Scholz and the »eye pictures«
Photo:
Michael Kappeler / dpa
When Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced the government's relief package in the Chancellery on Sunday morning, he was sitting in front of a painting that was anything but reassuring.
Chancellor, Finance Minister Christian Lindner, Green Party leader Omid Nouripour and SPD leader Saskia Esken looked rather small in front of the four-by-four-meter picture, which was colossal in every respect.
Above all, the painting distracted from the message that should be their common message: that the citizens of Germany should at least not worry too much about inflation.
The traffic light coalition takes care of it.
But this semi-abstract and rather spooky image - with a whole host of eyes looking down from skeptical to piercing - seemed to say just the opposite: Worry, beware!
It was created by the painter Ernst Wilhelm Nay (1902 to 1968) and is one of his three »eye pictures«; they have been hanging in the press and information room of the Chancellery for more than 20 years.
Nay painted the series for the Documenta in the early 1960s.
With this exhibition and with the artist himself, however, the country can no longer adorn itself quite as unreservedly as the people who hung these pictures in the new Berlin Chancellery at the beginning of the millennium had hoped.
For many, Nay was still the figurehead of the West German post-war avant-garde and was considered unsuspicious to the point of being adorable.
After all, he had once been one of those artists whose style had not been acceptable to the Nazis, and his pictures had been defamed in the propaganda show »Degenerate Art«.
In the meantime, however, it has been shown that this painter does not fit into the hero template as well as thought.
Art historians have just researched his biography and his art and organized a large exhibition with his pictures.
The show was recently shown at the Hamburger Kunsthalle and will be on view at the Museum Wiesbaden from mid-September.
In the accompanying catalogue, one can read that Nay – like other colleagues who appear more progressive on screen – definitely wanted to serve the Nazis.
In April 1933 he even wrote PR at a higher level (and contradicted the rumor that he was Jewish: "... neither on the father's side nor on the side of the mother not even the slightest drop of Jewish blood").
The present is "animated by a world view," he wrote, which he obviously wanted to offer, and included words like "blood," "primal forces," and "mythical roots."
He has also long been "deeply" involved in the "great new building".
Later he repeated his attempts at overtures and was quite successful: in 1939 it was said of him that he could still be described as a "quite idiosyncratic, but no longer a degenerate painter".
As a token of his gratitude, he also painted portraits of leaders.
The German Picasso
After the end of the Second World War, he soon became a star and was considered the German Picasso.
In 1955 he exhibited in New York and at the first Documenta.
He was also represented at the two following shows in Kassel. In 1964, SPIEGEL wrote soberly about his »eye pictures«: »Ernst Wilhelm Nay painted three variation pictures especially for the 'documenta', which hang diagonally from the ceiling and under which the visitors in go through a narrow tunnel more than twenty meters long;
you see the variation of an abstract pictorial theme in chronological order.«
Today, however, these works are a reminder that there are hardly any certainties.
Because even the Documenta myth – which for a long time stood for the new and now adamantly democratic Germany – and with which Nay and these concrete pictures are so closely linked, has now been shattered.
The German Historical Museum revealed in 2022 that a number of old Nazis were involved in the first editions of the show.
The worst was the art historian Werner Haftmann, a former SA man who was listed as a war criminal in Italy.
Haftmann described himself as a close friend of Nay, and after his death in 1968 he praised him as "one of the most important painters of our time".
At the time, Haftmann emphasized that Nay's late pictures were a final chord that "can make you fearful and anxious".
That should then also apply to the "eye pictures" that hang in the chancellery today.
Ironically, Scholz wanted to cheer up the country in front of this tricky legacy of images.
One can only advise for future announcements of this scope and for the state of mind of the nation: keep your eyes open when choosing the background.