Wols
“_When looking, we must not persist in what we could do with what we see. You have to see what is.” (Wols)
Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze, better known from 1937 under his artist name WOLS (an acronym resulting from the abbreviation of his name in a telegram), left Germany in 1932 to immerse himself at the age of 19 in the Parisian artistic ferment. In contact with the great artists and poets of Paris in the 1930s, this autodidact chose photography as a medium to launch an artistic career. Under the influence of surrealism, he produced his first drawings and watercolors, which contain the seeds of his desperate quest for new pictorial universes and creative processes. Over the years, Wols' pictorial language has become increasingly abstract.
In 1946, he turned to oil painting on the advice of art dealer René Drouin, who presented 40 of his paintings in his gallery, thus revealing him to a relatively wide audience. It is in the surface textures modeled in relief that his extraordinary pictorial language is at its zenith. These works owe their singularity to the superposition of layers of paint and the scratching of the surface layer. Wols's paintings in some ways prefigure informal art, notably Tachism, which dominated the European art scene in the 1950s and beyond.
Born in 1913 in Berlin, Wols died in 1951 from food poisoning. He is buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery. In the wake of Wols' posthumous participation in the first three documentas (1955, 1959 and 1964) and the Venice Biennale in 1958, his works were the subject of numerous personal exhibitions in prestigious institutions. On the occasion of his 100th anniversary, the Menil Collection in Houston and the Kunsthalle Bremen paid tribute to Wols' important work by presenting a vast retrospective.
Resources
Wols - The Abstract Expressionist
"The Veil of Veronica" (1946-47), by Wols - FranceCulture
Wols, Center Pompidou Exhibition - video
Wols, Natural Stories, Center Pompidou - video
Wols, Natural Stories, exhibition, CGP
Wols - Catalog of the exhibition at the Center Pompidou
Wols, Galerie Karsten Greve, Paris 2023
Exhibitions :
- Jean Paulhan through his painters
- Jean Paulhan, In the secret of modern painting
- Wols, Natural histories, Center Pompidou
- Wols, Karsten Greve Gallery, Paris
- Wols, Kunsthalle Bremen
- Wols, Menil Collection
See also, by Jean Paulhan :
Bibliography of texts published in the NRF
The texts below, published in La Nouvelle Revue Française, are grouped into four main sets: texts by Wols, notes and columns by the author, texts about the author, and, when available, translations by the author.
Texts about Wols
These texts may include thematic studies about the author, correspondence, reading notes on works by or about the author, interviews conducted by the author, or works edited by the author.
- Rétrospective Wols (Galerie Europe), by Jean Revol, 1960-02-01, Notes : les arts
Chronological distribution of texts published in the NRF (1908-1968)
This chart shows the chronological distribution of texts across the four categories defined above: Texts, Notes, Translations, and Texts about the author.
Textes parus dans les Cahiers de la Pléiade
Les textes qui suivent, publiés dans les Cahiers de la Pléiade, sont regroupés en trois ensembles, les textes de Wols, les textes traduits par l'auteur et les textes dont il est le sujet.
Textes sur Wols
Ces textes peuvent être des études thématiques sur l'auteur, des correspondances, des notes de lecture d'ouvrages de l'auteur ou sur l'auteur, ou d'ouvrages traduits par lui.
- Wols, Entretien sur l’Autorité, l’imprimerie des Arts, par René de Solier, automne 1951-printemps 1952 [204 p.]