- Wols
:"For the
Charlotte, North Carolina oldies radio station , seeWOLS ."Wols, was thepseudonym of Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze (May 27 1913 -September 1 1951 ), a German painter andphotographer predominantly active inFrance .Noted for his etchings and for his use of stains ("taches") of color dabbed onto the canvas (as exemplified by his painting "Composition", c. 1950), Wols pioneered a new style of expressive abstraction. Though unrecognized in his lifetime, he is considered one of the most influential artists of the
Tachisme movement.The quotation "To see, it is not necessary to know anything,...except how to see" is attributed to him.
Biography
Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze was born in
Berlin in 1913 into a wealthy family; his father was a high-rankingcivil servant andpatron of the arts who maintained friendships with many prominent artists of the period, includingOtto Dix . In 1919, the family moved toDresden . In 1924, Schulze was given astill camera , an event that, along with the death of his father in 1929, became one of the defining moments of his life.After abandoning school, Schulze pursued several interests, including
ethnography before moving to Paris on 1932 on the advice ofLaszlo Moholy-Nagy . After visiting Germany in 1933, he decided not to return, instead traveling toBarcelona ,Majorca , andIbiza , where he worked odd jobs, including a stint as ataxi driver and a German tutor.In 1936, he received official permission to live in Paris with the help of
Fernand Leger ; as an army deserter, Schulze had to report to the Paris police on a monthly basis. Beginning in 1937, he actively worked on his photographs, which were shown in many of Paris's most prestigious galleries. He befriended luminaries of the period, includingMax Ernst andJacques Prevert . As a German national, Schulze (like Ernst) was interned at the start of World War II, but was released by 1940. He spent most of the war trying toemigrate to the United States, an unsuccessful and costly enterprise that may have driven him toalcoholism .In the years following the war, Schulze concentrated on painting and
etching . His health declined severely towards the end of the 1940s; in 1951 he died offood poisoning (ironically, he had just been released from a hospital).External links
* Wols Etchings at the Tate [http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=2164]
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