Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze

Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze or Wols (1913-1951), or Wols, German painter, printmaker, and photographer, whose pseudonym was inspired by the remains of a mutilated telegram sent to him in 1937.

Wols was born on May 27, 1913, in Berlin, the son of a high-profile lawyer, and brought up in Dresden. As a young man he was a talented musician but he rejected an offer from the conductor Fritz Busch to find him a position in an orchestra. In 1932, after having studied for a short period at the Bauhaus (his only formal artistic training), he moved to Paris where he worked as a photographer and had contact with avant-garde artists such as Fernand Léger and Jean Arp. In 1933 he travelled to Barcelona where in 1935 he spent three months in prison after ignoring instructions to present himself to the German Labour Service. Deported to France he resumed his photographic career. He spent the war years first in internment camps and then avoiding the German authorities. Afterwards he achieved some standing as an artist but his life was dogged by poverty, ill health, and alcoholism, and he died in Paris on September 1, 1951, from food poisoning. The circumstances of his life and death helped foster a tragic legend.

During the 1930s Wols used Surrealist techniques of fragmentation and unexpected juxtaposition in his photography, sometimes concentrating on repellent subjects like flayed rabbits in line with the elevation of base and disturbing subject-matter of Georges Bataille. One image shows a dead plucked bird, its legs open in the manner of a woman giving birth, which appears to have laid an over-sized egg. Wols’s reputation today is mainly dependent on his paintings, drawings, and prints. These evoke whole worlds within a tiny space. They were much admired by the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre who saw in them, as in the work of Alberto Giacometti, an affirmation of freedom and risk. As Sartre put it: “Nothing is certain except that perfect precision leads to more rigorous imprecision.”

Like other abstract and semi-abstract painters of his generation, Wols rejected the emphasis on geometry and ideal form that had dominated the abstract art of the inter-war years. He has sometimes been referred to as an “informal” artist and in 1948 he exhibited alongside the action painter Georges Mathieu although his highly conscious and controlled processes were far from the “psychic automatism” proposed by early Surrealism. However, both circumstances and preference led him to simple means. For his etchings he used a steel gramophone needle and it was only with reluctance that after 1946 he began working on a larger scale. No authentic titles exist for any of his works.