In 2013, the Grand Palais presents the first retrospective dedicated to Georges Braque (1882-1963)
for almost forty years. Initiator of Cubism and inventor of collaged paper, he was
one of the avant-garde figures of the early 20th century, before refocusing his work on
the methodical exploration of still life and landscape. The exhibition offers a new
look at the work of the artist and putting his work into perspective with the
painting, literature or music of his time.

---

[Vidéos autour de l'exposition](https://www.dailymotion.com/playlist/x2sx5q#video=x14bev2)

[Présentation de l'exposition Georges Braque - vidéo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaLi6HRCKoI)

[Braque par Brigitte Léal, commissaire de l'exposition Braque au Grand Palais -vidéo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RO07nFDp45s)

[Dans les coulisses de l'expo Braque au Grand Palais - vidéo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMiA2UtxP2I)

[Exhibition news](https://www.grandpalais.fr/fr/article/georges-braque-toute-lactu-de-lexpo): articles, videos.


George Braque

poster for the Chicago Calling exhibition in Lausanne

The Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne is hosting the exhibition Chicago Calling, after its presentation in 2019 at lntuit, The center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, in Chicago, at the Halle Saint-Pierre, in Paris, and at the Kunsthaus de Kaufbeuren, in Germany.

Of all the great cities in America, Chicago has demonstrated the most artistic independence. From the 1940s, while the New York scene was turning towards abstract expressionism, Chicago's artistic circles were moving not only towards German expressionism and surrealism, but also towards primitive art and Art Brut. Their interest in the latter was nourished in particular by reading the writings of the German psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn and the French artist Jean Dubuffet, at the origin of the concept of Art Brut.

In 1951, on the occasion of the first retrospective of his work in Chicago, Dubuffet delivered his famous lecture Anticultural Positions at the Arts Club, arousing much enthusiasm among artists, collectors and informed amateurs. During that same year, he entrusted his collection of Art Brut works to his friend the painter Alfonso Ossorio, who lived in East Hampton, near New York. Stored and presented in his vast home for 10 years, it will be seen by influential people in the art world in New York, including the painters Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Clyfford Still.

In the 1960s, a group of artists known as the “Chicago Imagists,” including Roger Brown, Jim Nutt, and Gladys Nilsson, began collecting works outside the formal scope of art. Art Brut and Outsider Art will therefore quickly establish themselves among Chicago collectors, dealers and curators, leading to the founding, in 1991, of lntuit, a center dedicated to Outsider Art and Art Brut in the United States.

In Europe, the Collection de l’Art Brut, inaugurated in 1976, and heir to Dubuffet’s historic collection, is the first public museum institution to present works of Art Brut. And, from 1987, she regularly exhibited a large body of work by Henry Darger, an author from Chicago, some of which she owned thanks to an exceptional donation from the widow of Nathan Lerner. This photographer who was Darger's landlord, with the help of his wife Kiyoko Lerner, enabled the preservation of this masterful production.

Chicago Calling therefore offers us the opportunity to discover or rediscover this author who is among the most famous representatives of Art Brut in the United States, alongside five other self-taught creators also natives of Chicago: Lee Godie, Mr. Imagination, Pauline Simon, Wesley Willis and Joseph E. Yoakum. Their works come from Intuit and American private and public collections but also, as far as Darger is concerned, from the collection of the Collection de l’Art Brut.

The presentation at the Collection de l'Art Brut brings together works selected by Sarah Lombardi, from the exhibition designed by curators Kenneth C. Burkhart and Lisa Stone, and organized by Intuit, The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art.

Chicago Calling is organized by Intuit, The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art and supported by The Terra Foundation for American Art.
The Collection de l’Art Brut thanks the Library of the Institute of Humanities in Medicine for the loan of an original work for exhibition purposes.

---

[Visite virtuelle de l'exposition](https://www.swissartbooks.org/museums/cab/chicagocalling.html)

[La collection de l'Art Brut](https://lausanne-musees.ch/fr_CH/musees/collection-de-l-art-brut)

[Six artistes américains à découvrir dans "Chicago Calling" à l'Art Brut](https://www.rts.ch/info/culture/arts-visuels/11320985-six-artistes-americains-a-decouvrir-dans-chicago-calling-a-l-art-brut.html)


Chicago Calling

Poster for the Jean Fautrier exhibition, Matter and Light, at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2018

Little exhibited, this solitary artist is today considered the most important precursor of informal art in 1928, inventor of high pastes in 1940 and a major figure in the renewal of modern art after Cubism.
The exhibition will be a resumption of the Jean Fautrier retrospective which took place this summer at the Kunstmuseum in Winterthur (Switzerland) supplemented with works from the Museum of Modern Art, several French museums and private collections.

Jean Fautrier is particularly linked to the history of the collections and programming of the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris. Indeed, in 1964, the museum presented its first retrospective, produced in close collaboration with the artist following his significant donation. In 1989, a second retrospective provided a new perspective on his entire rich, varied and particularly unique body of work.

This new exhibition comes almost thirty years after the previous one. It is made up of around 200 works - including nearly 160 paintings, drawings and engravings, as well as a large group of sculptures - from numerous public and private collections, French and foreign. The exhibition will include almost the entire donation made by the artist to the museum, supplemented over time by significant donations and purchases. The Museum of Modern Art today has the largest Fautrier collection in museum collections (more than 60 works).

Jean Fautrier's painting career began in 1920. His painting, then figurative, consists of still lifes, landscapes and nudes which range from raw realism to a representation made of dark light with almost abstract shapes. After a brief recognition, the economic crisis of 1929 finally got the better of his career as an artist. Forced to leave Paris, he settled in the early 1930s in the Alps where he lived for several years, working as a ski instructor and manager of a hotel with a dance hall.

Returning to Paris in 1940, he found or met writers such as André Malraux, Francis Ponge, Paul Éluard, Georges Bataille and especially Jean Paulhan who would be his most fervent defender. During the war years, he developed a new form of image in which material took on more and more importance in the representation of objects, landscapes or bodies.

In his famous series - Hostages (1943-1945), Objects (1955), Nudes (1956), Partisans (1957) - material effects become the main subject of the work. Jean Fautrier uses a glue paint which mixes masses of pigments with transparent or opaque inks, from which sought-after and luminous harmonies emerge, thus creating various impastos and textures causing a certain anxiety.
In 1960, he was celebrated at the Venice Biennale with the Grand Prix for painting which he shared with Hans Hartung. Fautrier died in the summer of 1964, shortly after his first retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris.

This exhibition is co-organized with the Kunstmuseum Winterthur

Guest curator: Dieter Schwarz

---

[Catalogue de l'exposition](https://www.mam.paris.fr/fr/edition/jean-fautrier)


Jean Fautrier, Matter and Light

Poster for the retrospective exhibition on Fautrier at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1964

Archives of the exhibition "Jean Fautrier: retrospective" [presented at the MAM from 04/01 to 05/31/1964]

Four years after the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale (1960), a series of anthological events and an abundant and prestigious bibliography, Jean Fautrier's work still divided critics and remained unknown to the general public. This retrospective — accompanied by the artist's donation to the MAMVP allowing a presentation of his works in the museum's permanent collection — will contribute to wider recognition of Jean Fautrier.

---

[Catalogue de l'exposition](https://www.parismuseescollections.paris.fr/fr/ressources-bibliographiques/jean-fautrier-exposition-organisee-au-musee-d-art-moderne-de-la-ville-de#infos-principales)

[Oeuvres en relation avec l'exposition](https://www.parismuseescollections.paris.fr/fr/musee-d-art-moderne/oeuvres/les-boites-de-conserve#infos-principales)


Jean Fautrier: retrospective, MAM 1964

No exhibition has yet paid tribute to Félix Fénéon (1861-1944), actor
major of the artistic scene of the end of the 19th century and the turn of the 20th
century. The Orangerie Museum in association with the Quai Museum
Branly-Jacques Chirac and The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA) offers
celebrate his extraordinary personality, still unfairly unknown.
The exhibition will show the different facets of this singular character,
Quaker physique and deadpan humor, who knew how to reconcile a career as
model civil servant, artistic commitment and anarchist beliefs.
Columnist, editor at the _Revue Blanche_, art critic, publisher - he published
The _Illuminations_ of Rimbaud -, gallery owner, Fénéon was also a
exceptional collector who brings together a significant number of masterpieces
including a unique set of African and Oceanian sculptures. Support
unconditional fan of neo-impressionism, discoverer of Seurat, director
artistic of the Bernheim-Jeune gallery, defending fauvism, futurism,
Matisse, Fénéon's role on the artistic scene of the early 20th century was
determining.

The exhibition will bring together an exceptional collection of paintings and drawings by Seurat, Signac, Degas, Bonnard, Modigliani, Matisse, Derain, Severini, Balla, etc., African and Oceanian pieces as well as documents and archives.

---

Exhibition catalog

Felix Feneon  
Critic, collector, anarchist  
Co-edition Musées d’Orsay and de l’Orangerie / RMN-GP / Musée du quai Branly –
Jacques Chirac  
320 pages – 18 x 25.4 cm – Approximately 200 illustrations  
Version: French  
ISBN code: 978-2-7118-7444-6  
Price: €39.90

---

[Félix Fénéon. Les temps nouveaux, de Seurat à Matisse - Musée de l'Orangerie, 2020 - Isabelle Cahn - vidéo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNaWhVnnp4M)


Félix Fénéon. New times, from Seurat to Matisse

Poster for the Félix Fénéon exhibition, The distant arts, at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris

Anarchist, art critic, publisher, gallery director, passionate collector... Portrait in two chapters of Félix Fénéon, extraordinary personality and talent discoverer, at the Orsay and Orangerie museums and at the Quai Branly museum - Jacques Chirac.

The Orsay and Orangerie museums, the Musée du Quai Branly - Jacques Chirac and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, pay tribute for the first time to Félix Fénéon (1861-1944), a major player in the artistic world of the end of the 19th century and the turn of the 20th century. Anarchist, magazine director, art dealer, prodigious collector, Fénéon defended an open vision of creation at the time of art's shift towards modernity and worked for the recognition of non-Western arts.

Author in 1920 of the vibrant plea “Will they be admitted to the Louvre? », he questions, in an article which will become one of the founding texts of the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, the status of “distant arts”, seventy years before Jacques Kerchache's manifesto. A commitment that goes hand in hand with the development of an extraordinary personal collection which includes, alongside paintings by his friends Seurat, Vuillard, Toulouse-Lautrec, Braque, Matisse and Modigliani, one of the most important collections of art from Africa and Oceania of the time – including the Fang Mabea statue. Here is a reference collection, whose global influence and influence on the artistic avant-garde of the 1930s are no longer in doubt.

The second part of the exhibition will be entitled “Félix Fénéon (1861-1944). The New Times, from Seurat to Matisse” and will be presented at the Musée de l’Orangerie from October 16, 2019 to January 27, 2020. It will show the different facets of this singular character, with a Quaker physique and deadpan humor, who knew how to reconcile a career as a model civil servant, artistic commitment and anarchist convictions.

Exhibition organized by the Musée du Quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, Paris,
Orsay and Orangerie museums, Paris and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

---

Exhibition catalog

Art critic, collector, anarchist, but also publisher and gallery director, Félix Fénéon (1861-1944) never stopped defending a decompartmentalized vision of creation at the time of the shift of art towards modernity. Unconditional support of neo-impressionism, discoverer of Seurat, artistic director of the Bernheim-Jeune gallery, defending fauvism, futurism and Matisse, he was also one of the first collectors of African and Oceanian art. His investigation Will they be admitted to the Louvre? which questions the status of sculptures and primitive art objects is a real plea for “distant arts”. No exhibition had yet paid homage to Félix Fénéon who cultivated a taste for discretion. This work, through extracts from his writings and a selection of major works that he collected and defended, testifies to his commitment and shows the relevance of the eye and choices of this singular character.

Description  
Collective exhibition catalog - 2019 18 × 25.4 cm - 320 p. - French - €39.90

Co-edition of the Orsay and Orangerie museums, Quai Branly museum – Jacques Chirac, RMN-GP editions

---

[Présentation de l'exposition - vidéo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=piGjeZq9hDY)

[Félix Fénéon. Les arts lointains - Musée du Quai Branly, 2020 - Philippe Pelletier - vidéo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQm2SWqFYqg)


Félix Fénéon. The distant arts

**Tribute to COMMERCE** 
LETTERS AND ARTS IN PARIS 
1920 - 1935

_Exhibition under the patronage of the French Embassy in Italy, the City of Rome, the Primoli Foundation, and the French Association of Artistic Action_. 
December 5 - January 30 
Palazzo Primoli, Piazza Zanardelli 1, Rome

Commerce, a literary magazine founded in 1924 by Marguerite Caetani, introduces itself
in the form of twenty-nine “quarterly notebooks published by”
Valéry, Fargue and Larbaud. It fits masterfully into the field
competitive with the magazines of the 1920s. Commerce plays the role of “discoverer” important, opens up to the best foreign authors of his time and
rediscovers ancient capital texts: through his “modern classic” spirit,
Commerce reinvents the classic heritage.

* * *

_You ask me how Commerce started. I'll tell you. At the time of the Villa Romaine (this is the name of the residence where Marguerite Caetani stayed, in Versailles, for many years), we brought together a crowd of artists for our Sunday lunches, lunches which extended until they became “Sunday dinners”. Among those present, a small group of friends, which included Valéry, Valery Larbaud, Fargue, Adrienne Monnier, Paulhan, a painter or two, a musician or two, got into the habit of having lunch together every two weeks. We met in a restaurant, always different, if possible, and generally chosen by Fargue_. 
_One day, Valéry suddenly said: “why don’t we continue our meetings by publishing, in review, our dialogues. As a title, I suggest Commerce: Trading in Ideas”. This idea enchanted everyone present. Directors were appointed immediately. Adrienne Monnier and I took charge of getting it ready and we started straight away. As for the result, it's up to you to judge. I was enormously helped by Paulhan who allowed me to search among the manuscripts he received for the Nouvelle Revue Française, as well as by Alexis Léger who chose the poems that we published. 
(Marguerite Caetani, extract from the exhibition catalogue)￼￼

---

[Sommaires de la revue Commerce](/revues/commerce)

---

Homage to Commerce: letters and arts in Paris, 1920-1935

Exploring a relationship that is both personal and artistic, the exhibition focuses on the writer and painter Henri Michaux (1899-1984) and the painter Zao Wou-Ki (1920-2013). Arriving from China in France at the beginning of spring 1948, Zao Wou-Ki met Henri Michaux at the end of the following year. This human relationship, which was to last until the poet's death, made up of warm attention on both sides, was also and above all an artistic relationship. Not only did Michaux provide his “endorsement” to the young painter, but his painted and drawn work and that of Zao Wou-Ki share a certain number of choices which bring operational procedures into play: attention to signs, appetite for experimentation, importance of gesture, primacy of movement.

The pieces exhibited mainly came from the collection of rare Henri Michaux editions owned by the Martin Bodmer Foundation, from the collection of Micheline Phankim, Michaux's successor, that of Françoise Marquet, Zao Wou-Ki's successor, and that of Sven Pitseys, a Belgian bibliophile well known to Michaux fans. One-off loans were finally granted, in Switzerland by the Prints Cabinet of the Museum of Art and History of the City of Geneva and by the museums of Winterthur and Locarno, in France by the National Museum of Modern Art (Centre Georges Pompidou) and by the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris. Many of the pieces selected for the exhibition were shown for the first time, and their bringing together constitutes an event in itself.

Curator: Bernard Vouilloux and Jacques Berchtold

---

[Présentation de l'exposition](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHtVec95Jv0&feature=youtu.be)


Henri Michaux and Zao Wou-Ki in the empire of signs

Poster for the Jean Paulhan exhibition through his painters

[Braque](/artists/braque'), [Picasso](/artists/picasso), [Fautrier](/artists/fautrier), [Dubuffet](/artists/dubuffet), [Michaux](/authors/henri-michaux), [Klee](/artists/paul-klee), [Wols](/artists/wols), [Rouault](/artists/rouault), [Seurat](/artists/seurat), [Soutine](/artists/soutine) [Chirico](/artists/chirico), [Chagall](/artists/chagall), [Chaissac](/artists/gaston-chaissac), [Karskaya](/artists/karskaya), [Fever](/artists/yolande-fever)...

---

See the [exhibition presentation text](/sur-paulhan/jean-paulhan-a-travers-ses-peintres) by André Berne-Joffroy who was also the organizer

[Jean Paulhan à travers ses peintres, par Jean-Marie Dunoyer, Le Monde 7 février 1974](https://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/1974/02/07/jean-paulhan-a-travers-ses-peintres_2531336_1819218.html)


Jean Paulhan through his painters

Paulhan and Braque, in Georges Braque's studio in 1943, observing a painting.

This temporary exhibition-file is presented in one of the rooms of the Museum, on the 5th floor, as part of the new presentation of the modern collections.

It was during the Occupation, in 1942, that exchanges intensified between Jean Paulhan, writer and editor, host of _La Nouvelle Revue Française_, and the painter Georges Braque. Paulhan then seeks refuge in art from the heartbreaks that literature is experiencing. Shortly after, he met Jean Fautrier and Jean Dubuffet. He senses in their paintings the revelation of a “secret”, which he sets out to define in his writings on painting. He also confides the two founding experiences of his “initiation” to modern art. The first is that of the “dark room”, an experience of the emergence of reality in the darkness, which Paulhan puts in parallel with the revelation of the “truth”. objects in Cubist works. The second is that of the “blind spot”, a zone of failure of vision, constitutive of the gaze, which he compares to informal art: the lack is understood there as the very heart of painting. Among the works that Paulhan dedicated to art, let us cite in particular _Braque le patron_ and _Fautrier l'enragé_, exhibited here.

Anne Lemonnier

Curator: Mnam/Cci / Anne Lemonnier


Jean Paulhan, In the secret of modern painting

Poster for the Pollock exhibition at the Center Pompidou in Paris, in 1982

This exhibition is dedicated to Jackson Pollock, hero of painting in the United States, after the Second World War. This is his first retrospective in France in 20 years.

As an introduction to the work of Jackson Pollock, paintings by Picasso, André Masson, Rothko, Motherwell... and numerous documents. Alongside the exhibition, the Center Georges Pompidou is organizing a series of conferences, as well as an important cycle of documentary films on and around Pollock.

Pollock said: “When I am in my painting, I am not conscious of what I am doing. It’s only after a sort of “acquaintance” that I see what I wanted to do. I am not afraid to make changes, to destroy the image, because a painting has its own life. I try to let it emerge. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is chaotic. Otherwise there is total harmony, easy exchange, and the picture is successful. »
Quoted by Jim Palette in CNAC magazine, n°7, January-February 1982

This exhibition is produced with the assistance of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the National Gallery in Washington.

Curator: Mnam, Daniel Abadie


Pollock's masterpieces

the praying mantis, by Germaine Richier, at the Center Pompidou

A tribute to Germaine Richier, the first sculptor exhibited at the National Museum of Modern Art in 1956, this retrospective brings together nearly 200 works - sculptures, engravings, drawings.

Fueled by new research, it demonstrates how Germaine Richier occupies a central position in the history of modern sculpture, as a link between Rodin and the first Caesar. Trained in the tradition of Auguste Rodin and Antoine Bourdelle, Germaine Richier established herself as profoundly original and radical in just over 25 years, from the 1930s to her early death in 1959. The exhibition traces her artistic trajectory chronologically, illuminating the major themes that nourish her sculptural practice (humans, animals, myths, etc.). It reveals how Richier revitalized the figure, forging new images of man and woman after the war.


Germaine Richier, Center Pompidou

Max Ernst, “The Angel of the Home (The Triumph of Surrealism)”, 1937 © Adagp, Paris. Vincent Everarts Photography

Designed like a labyrinth, the “Surrealism” exhibition is an unprecedented dive into the exceptional creative effervescence of the surrealist movement, born in 1924 with the publication of André Breton’s founding _Manifesto_.

Combining paintings, drawings, films, photographs and literary documents, the exhibition presents the works of the movement's emblematic artists (Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Joan Miró) but also those of female surrealists (including Leonora Carrington, Ithell Colquhoun, Dora Maar).

Both chronological and thematic, the journey is punctuated by 14 chapters evoking the literary figures who inspired the movement (Lautréamont, Lewis Carroll, Sade...) and the poetic principles which structure its imagination (the artist-medium, the dream, the philosopher's stone, the forest...).

At the heart of the exhibition, a central “drum” housing the original manuscript of the _Manifesto_, an exceptional loan from the National Library of France. A multimedia projection accompanies the discovery of this unique document, shedding light on its genesis and its meaning.

[Le Surréalisme au Centre Georges Pompidou](https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/recherche?terms=surr%C3%A9alisme)

[Le site André Breton](https://www.andrebreton.fr/)


Surrealism, Center Pompidou

work by Wols exhibited at the Center Pompidou

From March 4 to May 18, the Center Pompidou graphic arts gallery is hosting an exhibition dedicated to the artist Wols.

Of Wols, who died in 1951, we often only remember the tragic destiny so closely linked to history: the choice of exile while Germany was consumed by Nazism; the precariousness of the undocumented emigrant; internment in camps in the southern zone after the outbreak of the conflict; the wanderings, after the war, in Saint-Germain-des-Prés where he completed his slow suicide through alcohol.

The exhibition aims to reread his drawing, in the light of his other practices, writing, photography and painting. Conceived as an initiatory journey, it is divided into five sections – trap, transmute, concentrate, decompose, splash – describing the way in which Wols transposes the world he perceives into his images.

---

[Wols, Exposition Centre Pompidou - vidéo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=12&v=iasrV1P3vfQ&feature=emb_logo)

[Wols, Histoires naturelles, Centre Pompidou - vidéo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKgE0qkKftg)

[Wols - Catalogue de l'exposition au Centre Pompidou](https://boutique.centrepompidou.fr/fr/monographie-et-mouvements-artistiques/wols-catalogue-de-lexposition/2084.html)

[Wols au Centre Pompidou](https://www.centrepompidou.fr/cpv/resource/cbqLrd6/rbqakbM)


Wols, Natural histories, Center Pompidou

work by Wols exhibited at the Karsten Greve gallery in Paris in 2023

The Karsten Greve Gallery is pleased to present for the first time in its Parisian space a retrospective devoted to Wols (1913, Berlin – 1951, Paris), 25 years after a first exhibition in the Cologne gallery. Celebrating one hundred and ten years since the artist's birth, this exhibition illustrates the importance of Wols' singular art through the largest collection of works on canvas and paper, photographs, printed works and letters ever assembled in France, coming from the collection of Karsten Greve, but also from important private collections.

“_WOLS, little man from the Moon who landed among us, conducts his stubborn monologue with the obstinacy of a conscientious loyalist. Its mysterious hieroglyphs which, in their finesse compete with the spider, teach us the poetry of the interplanetary astral and reconstitute under the subtle refractions of their iridescent light, the fauna, the flora and even the humanities of the dream of invisible microcosms,” wrote Jean Sylveire in 1943. The visionary work of Wols (from his birth name Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze) is in the image of his time and his life: marked by war, exile, symbolic of the ineffable pain faced with the bitterness of the post-war period.

[Vidéo de présentation de l'exposition](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbGtr6wKJ8w)

[Writer and art critic Shigeo Chiba on WOLS (Paris 2023)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIGKyJX14go) Shigeo Chiba is the author of the catalog raisonné of Wols' work.

[Art historian and curator Sarah Wilson on WOLS (Paris 2023)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWWbnfNTAQU)

[Art dealer and collector Karsten Greve on WOLS (Paris 2023)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwT-9Eir3sg)

Wols, Karsten Greve Gallery, Paris

In honor of Wols’ (Wolfgang Schulze, 1913-1951) hundredth birthday, the Kunsthalle Bremen together with the Menil Collection in Houston is presenting the exhibition “Wols: The Retrospective.” This is the most extensive presentation of the artist’s work in almost 25 years (since the exhibition in the Kunsthaus Zurich and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf in 1989), including over 200 works (about 35 paintings, 125 watercolors and drawings, 30 photographs, and 10 illustrated books).  
Wols’ equally eventful and tragic biography, shaped by war, flight and destitution, was seen, until now, as the decisive key to the understanding of his work. For the first time, the exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bremen takes as its starting point the work itself and looks at the artist as a protagonist of the international avant-garde. It traces the path from the artist's initial Surrealist experiments to his revolutionary late work which, as a manifestation of Art Informel, exercised one of the decisive influences on post-1945 art. Over a productive period of only fifteen years, Wols created an oeuvre which numbers among the most astounding artistic achievements of mid-twentieth century art. Wols' drawings, watercolors, and paintings developed from a slow creative process and a capacity for transformation which can be traced in the works themselves. The exhibition culminates in the impressive selection of paintings in which the artist creates abstract structures and rough surface textures that are the foundation of a new painterly language.  
The curators Dr. Ewald Rathke, the recognized Wols expert who has concerned himself with the artist for over five decades, and Toby Kamps from the Menil Collection have made a concise selection, shedding new light onto the work of this outstanding 20th-century artist and impressively demonstrating his continuing relevance. The rich holdings of the Menil Collection in Houston and of the Karin und Uwe Hollweg Foundation in Bremen form the basis of this selection complemented by many rarely seen works on loan from international museums and private collectors.  
Following the presentation at the Kunsthalle Bremen, the exhibition will be shown at the Menil Collection, Houston from the 12 September 2013 to 12 January 2014. A substantial and richly illustrated publication accompanies the exhibition.


Wols, Kunsthalle Bremen

Cover of the catalog of the Wols exhibition at the Menil Collection in Houston, 2013

This is the first museum retrospective exhibition of the artist Wols (1913–1951) in the United States. Comprising approximately 100 works, international loans of approximately 20 oil paintings and 50 drawings, watercolors, photographs, and etchings supplement the Menil Collection’s strong holdings of the artist’s work.

A draftsman, painter, and photographer, Wols was one of the most ingenious and influential—if commercially unsuccessful—artists to emerge in postwar Europe. Along with Jean Dubuffet, Pierre Soulages, and Georges Mathieu, Wols was a leading figure in Tachisme, a movement in painting Americans consider to be a European parallel to Abstract Expressionism. Named for the French word stain, meaning stain, Tachisme—an outgrowth of the larger trend of Art Informel, or “art without form” movement—cultivated an automist style emphasizing free lines and forms drawn from the artist’s psyche.

Wols did not start his intimately scaled drawings and watercolor paintings with preconceived compositions. Instead, his unconscious, in the Surrealist and existentialist senses of the word, shaped his images, which began with a few marks, then were carefully developed into highly complex self-contained visual universes. Early drawings and watercolors include fantastical animals, figures, sailing ships, and cityscapes. Later oil paintings are almost entirely abstract, using heavy impasto and tentacle like drips to suggest powerful emanations that suggest otherworldly flowers or atomic explosions.

Born Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze in Berlin, Wols moved to Paris in 1932 to escape his austere bourgeois roots and the authority of a father who was chancellor of the German state of Saxony. There he changed his name to Wols—inspired by a mistake on a telegram—and eked out a living during the difficult wartime years by teaching German and making drawings, paintings, photographs, and etchings. A number of his prints were used as illustrations for texts by Antonin Artaud, Franz Kafka, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and exhibitions of his work in Paris in 1945 and 1947 at Galerie Drouin and other galleries in France, Italy, and the United States allowed him a precarious existence, made difficult by constant illness and alcoholism.

Notoriously reticent about his work, Wols once explained his vision of the world by referring to a crack in the sidewalk: “Look at that crack. It is like one of my drawings. It’s a living thing. It will grow… It was created by the only force that is real.” The growing esteem that Wols enjoyed in Europe had no counterpart on this side of the Atlantic during or after his lifetime.

Organized by the Menil Collection and Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Toby Kamps in conjunction with the Kunsthalle Bremen, Germany, WOLS: Retrospective introduces broad audiences to the work of a fascinating artist who for the most part remains unknown in the United States.


Wols, Menil Collection

In the period following his installation in Paris in 1948, Zao Wou-Ki explored the theme of daytime or nocturnal light in a series of poetic works simply integrating the representation of the lunar and solar stars. The transition to abstraction made in the mid-1950s through the use of the sign borrowed from Paul Klee, enriched his relationship with light and darkness, then expressed by the play of colored masses, which clash or merge.
The practice of Chinese ink, thanks to Henri Michaux from 1970, allowed him to develop Chinese tradition. He then begins work on emptiness, associated with white or reserve, and fullness, associated with the black of ink. This research extends into his painting and makes him discover new spaces.
The works of the 1970s and 1980s refer to a darker side corresponding to periods of suffering and mourning. These comings and goings between light and shadow draw their inspiration from the long history of Chinese painting which seeks the balance of opposites.

Guided from his beginnings and until the end of his life by the genius of Paul Cézanne (Hangzhou Landscape, 1946; Homage to Cézanne, 2005), Zao Wou-Ki was also sensitive to the specific light of the southern sun of France. After renting a workshop in the Var between 1958 and 1972 where he met a number of friends, he accepted the proposal of Josep Lluis Sert who built him a workshop in Ibiza in 1973, a new place of creation.
From 2004, Zao Wou-Ki stayed several times in summer at the Luberon property of fashion designer Emanuel Ungaro, who was also very attached to his hometown of Aix-en-Provence. Zao Wou-Ki works there “on the motif”, something new for him, and paints a series of watercolors which will be presented for the first time at the Hôtel de Caumont. They reflect the luminosity and colors, sometimes flamboyant, sometimes muted, of the landscapes of the Luberon. These works express at the last moment of his life his unchanging joy of painting.

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[Zao Wou-Ki à l’Hôtel de Caumont d’Aix-en-Provence - Connaissance des Arts](https://www.connaissancedesarts.com/artistes/zao-wou-ki/idee-de-sortie-zao-wou-ki-a-lhotel-de-caumont-daix-en-provence-podcast-11160492/)


Les expositions autour des artistes de Jean Paulhan