BUSCH-REISINGER PRESENTS FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THE UNITED STATES AN EXHIBITION OF 1930s PHOTOGRAPHS BY WOLS

Contact: Kate McShea Ewen (617) 495-2397
Released: December 31, 1998

Cambridge, Massachusetts - The special exhibition Wols Photographs will be on display at the Busch-Reisinger Museum from February 13 through April 25, 1999. This exhibition of 1930s photographs by Wols will be the first presentation of this material in the United States. The German-French artist Wols, a pseudonym for Wolfgang Otto Schulze (1913-1951), rose to fame in the post-1945 European art scene as the founder of Informel painting. Previous European curators and scholars have thus presented Wols's photographs of the 1930s as anticipations of or studies for the later paintings. By contrast, this exhibition and the accompanying catalogue will, for the first time, present the photographs as an independent, coherent body of work that resonates with European photographic practices in the twenties and thirties.

Forty-nine photographs, four magazines, and one watercolor will be on display. Twenty-nine photographs will be lent by The J. Paul Getty Museum along with loans from other museums, libraries and private collections in the U.S. and Europe. The exhibition is guest-curated by Christine Mehring, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University. Major funding for this exhibition and catalogue comes from the Friends of the Busch-Reisinger Museum/Verein der Freunde des Busch-Reisinger Museums e.V. Additional support was provided by the Louise E. Bettens Fund, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Jose Soriano Fund.

Wols began his career as a photographer after moving from his native Germany to Paris in 1932. His photographs depict a reality that is vanishing: moving away from the world of their viewers into their own, dissolving into mere forms, on the verge of being unrecognizeable. As such, they engage with contemporary European photographic practices, with the formal views of reality in the German Bauhaus and with the unfamiliar renderings of the world by the French Surrealists. Yet Wols's photographs, in combining their curiosity and repulsion, inspection and alienation, display an independent vision of the world. The exhibition is divided into four sections that explore Wols's portraits, fashion photographs, abstractions, and still lifes.

In the early 1940s Wols turned to drawing and painting, as the circumstances during the war and his flight to southern France made it increasingly difficult to borrow photographic equipment. He continued to paint until his death in 1951 and to this day is mainly known as the founder of Informel painting, a mode of gestural abstraction that dominated in Europe during the 1940s and 1950s. Therefore when Wols's negatives and some prints were rediscovered in the mid-1970s, they were initially understood as the origins of his later work in watercolor and oil.

This resulted in such compelling juxtapositions as the one that introduces the exhibition, an Untitled watercolor from 1939-40 and an Untitled (Rabbit/comb/button) vintage gelatin silver print from 1938-39. But the pictures' similar scattered arrangement of organic forms detracts from important differences. The watercolor attains a strong visual presence resulting from sharply delineated shapes and underlined by its color and textured surface. The photograph, by contrast, renders its motif as vanishing: a fragmented, decaying rabbit; and a button, comb, and harmonica merging with their respective grounds. Wols's paintings are about coming into presence, while his photographs are all about verging onto absence.

During the 1930s, Wols was mainly known as a portrait photographer, for this part of his oeuvre was the only one ever exhibited during his life-time, at the well-known Galerie de la Pléiade in Paris in February 1937. Like the portraits of many contemporary photographers such as Walter Peterhans or Man Ray, Wols's faces are effaced. His camera empties his sitters, including himself, of human traces and transforms them into objects. Facial features drown in shadows and light reflections. Views from above, closed eyes, or supine positions render models lifeless. Heads turn into masks, be it through exaggerated grimacing or close-ups that enlarge pores and wrinkles. The viewer will encounter Nicole Bouban from above, lying down with her eyes closed. Her shoulders are hardly visible, but their weight presses down against the draped ground. This cloth in turn pushes up, as its white butterflies and flowers float around Bouban's pale face and white-blond curls, even crawl into the back of her hair. The viewer sees her face from close up, made up to a quiescent immaculate mask, with strong mascara sealing her eyes shut. Wols always made series of exposures when making portraits, photographing people in changing positions. Occasionally there are up to two dozens of one person, and he made over forty of Nicole Bouban.

In 1937, Wols was commissioned as official photographer for the fashion pavilion, "Le Pavillon de l'Elégance," of the Paris World's Fair. The pavilion was a joint venture of surrealist inspired architects, mannequin sculptors, and fashion designers. As such, it was a prime example of the pervasiveness of surrealist imagery in France during the late 1930s, especially within the cultural establishment and fashion world. Wols's photographs of the pavilion increase the surrealist feel of its lifeless mannequins and discomforting setting. For example, Wols stages the lighting to create menacing shadows, he crops his images to create claustrophobic spaces, or chooses motifs of crated mannequin parts from the pavilion's construction. Serial or clustered arrangements of body parts are more lifeless than the dressed mannequins, but equally animated as they seem to walk in a row as in Untitled (Mannequin Row), in which the frame cuts off the upper bodies and dismembers the mannequins, or reach out of their crates as in Untitled (Hands), in which severed hands are flattened into black silhouettes without substance. Wols's fashion photographs were sold as postcards and published internationally. The magazine lay-outs frequently play with the unfamiliar qualities of the photographs, repeating their forms in typographic design, scattering images across the page, or tilting them parallel to their figures losing balance.

Wols's abstractions bear traces of reality but treat it as a repertoire of lines and planes, shapes and patterns. Close-up views eliminate spatial markers, strong contrasts of light and dark as well as shadows wash out details and context alike. For example, in Wols's Untitled (Knee), the left side of his model Nina Engel's leg is so brightly lit so as to eclipse pores and skin irregularities. It is a leg, but a leg about to become an amorphous white plane. In the course of the 1930s, Wols increasingly favors motifs particularly suitable to this end, such as wet reflective surfaces or flat patterns. Although not destroying the laws of perspective, Wols's Untitled (Cobblestones) confuses them. In the photograph, a left stripe of cobbles tapers to the back as expected and so does the curb taken by itself. However as the curb joins with the pavement to fill the right half of the image, its spatial recession is inverted. The right stripe of the image tapers to the front, thus flattening the space of the image as a whole. Wols's point of view, raised only slightly in this street photograph, is frequently oriented from top to bottom. This bird's-eye-perspective further contributes to the leveling of everything in the image. In addition, he often positions the camera close-up, getting our eyes closer than we might like, making us see familiar objects and textures at a different scale.

Wols's still lifes are photographed in a classical manner with food placed in the center of the image and viewed from above. Paradoxically, the world they depict appears nauseating, unfamiliar, and entirely removed from the human realm. The abandoned food grows or decays, as in Untitled (Onion), in which the onion sprouts two groups of tentacle-like stems from its top. Wols has lighted and placed the onion in such a way as to maximize the round plasticity of these stems. The slightly elevated side view visually elongates the stems to a scale out of proportion with the body of the onion. They reach out and up, as if breaking through the photographic surface. The bright light reflections popping up in the surrounding, white lines and ovals, suggest appendage, severed and multiplying. Some foods look partially consumed and abandoned thereafter, as in Untitled (Bread Slice). Others are intact but nevertheless drained of their organic feel, as in Untitled (Mushrooms). The "food stuff" in Wols's still lifes may be entirely unrecognizeable or appear as mere matter useless to us. In the more serial arrangements, items seem to be in dialogue with one another. As such, these photographs tell of an experience of powerlessness in the late Parisian 1930s, a period of utter uncertainty, between the dissolution of the Popular Front and the declaration of war with Germany, within a fragile system of collective security supported by non-aggression treaties and friendship pacts across Europe.

Within this still life section, a comparison draws attention to the differences between so-called "vintage prints" and "modern prints." Modern prints date much later than the negative from which they are made. They are printed either by the artist or posthumously by authorized others, sometimes using a different technique or paper. Wols, for example, did not always have the means and equipment to print his photographs and many of the prints he did develop were subsequently destroyed or lost. He had some of his photographs developed commercially, as visible in Untitled (Grapefruit) with its small size and crenolated edges. Most of Wols's photographs have survived only as modern prints, made following the rediscovery of the negatives in the mid-1970s. The majority of the prints in the exhibition were printed by Georg Heusch in 1976 in a manner similar to Wols vintage prints. His primary concern at the time was conservation, as evidenced, for example, by his decision to leave the negative frames visible in the prints. More than many subsequent modern prints, Heusch's prints are nevertheless similar to some of Wols's vintage prints in scale, tonality, and paper quality.

Exhibition Catalogue

Wols Photographs will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue written by Christine Mehring. The catalogue will include an interpretive essay, an essay on the various printings and dating of Wols's photographs, an introduction to and translation of the 1932 text "The Photography of Wolfgang Schulz" by the Dutch cultural critic H. van Loon, an extensive bibliography, and a checklist of the exhibition. (Paper, approximately 112 pages, 68 black-and-white illustrations, $15).

RELATED EVENTS

Gallery talks
Gallery talks are free to the public with the price of Art Museums' admission. Admission is free on Wednesdays and Saturday mornings. Hearing assists are available for gallery talks; arrangements should be made beforehand by phoning (617) 495-8286. To request a sign language interpreter, the public should call (617) 495-2397 using Massachusetts Telephone Relay Service 1-800-439-2370, preferably three weeks in advance of the gallery talk.

Saturday, February 27, 11:30 a.m., Busch-Reisinger Museum
Graham Bader, Ph.D. candidate, Department of History of Art and Architecture.

Saturday, March 13, 11:30 a.m., Busch-Reisinger Museum
Christine Mehring, Ph.D. candidate, Department of History of Art and Architecture.

Sunday, March 14, 2:00 p.m., Busch-Reisinger Museum
Christine Mehring, Ph.D. candidate, Department of History of Art and Architecture.

Sunday, April 18, 2:00 p.m., Busch-Reisinger Museum
Graham Bader, Ph.D. candidate, Department of History of Art and Architecture.

Available Photographs
Editors: All images © 1999 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris
Please credit Galerie Berinson, Berlin for the Nicole Bouban image.

Nicole Bouban, c. 1933
Vintage gelatin silver print
17.9 x 24.2 cm
Galerie Berinson, Berlin, GERMANY

Europe: An American Monthly Pages 36-37, September 1937
Magazine
28.6 x 22.2 cm closed, 28.6 x 44.4 cm opened
Northup Library, Linfield College, McMinnville, Oregon

Le Pavillon de L'Elegance (Mannequin Row), 1937
1976 gelatin silver print by Georg Heusch from a 1937 negative
17.3 x 15.9 cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California

Untitled (Cobblestones), c. 1932-1942
1976 gelatin silver print by Georg Heusch from a 1932-1942 negative
17.3 x 16.5 cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California

Untitled (Piece of Cheese), c. 1938-39
1976 gelatin silver print by Georg Heusch from a c. 1938-39 negative
17.3 x 17.3 cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California

Untitled (Lemons), c. 1938-39
1976 gelatin silver print by Georg Heusch from a c. 1938-39 negative
14.3 x 20.6 cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California

Untitled (Onion on plate), c. 1938-39
1976 gelatin silver print by Georg Heusch from a c. 1938-39 negative
21.6 x 14.6 cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California

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