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Art of the 20th Century
Wols
(Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze)
Wols
(1913 – 1951)
Wols, (born Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze) is seen as the main initiator and pioneer of Tachism.
40 black-and-white photographs, 12 watercolours and 33 etchings reveal influences from surrealist circles in Paris. Wols took most of his photographs – scenes from everyday life, portraits, and absurd, morbid still lives – in the 1930s. Thinking graphically, he composed the light and shade, spaces and lines of his motives in unusual pictorial unities. During the 1940s, Wols created many etchings (some of which were used as illustrations for texts by Jean Paul Sartre, Antonin Artaud, Franz Kafka and others), in which he abstracted the natural structures of animals and plants. In his watercolours of the 1940s, he also captured emotional impulses in restrained, yet intense dynamic lines. From colour areas he developed visionary structural sequences and urban topographies, using fine, small-scale line drawings.
