Christine Mehring

104 pages, 9 x 10 1/2"; 68 b & w illustrations; 1999

ISBN 1-891771-04-3 (paper) $21

The German-French artist Wols, a pseudonym for Wolfgang Schulze (1913–1951), rose to fame in the post-1945 European art scene as the founder of Informel painting, a mode of gestural abstraction. European curators and scholars have thus often presented Wols’s photographs of the 1930s as anticipations of or studies for the later paintings. By contrast, this catalogue and the exhibition it accompanied present the photographs as an independent, coherent body of work that resonates with European photographic practices of the time, from the formal concerns of the German Bauhaus to the unfamiliar renderings of the world by the French surrealists. Yet Wols’s photographs (among them portraits, fashion photographs, abstractions, and still lifes)—in combining curiosity and repulsion, inspection and alienation—display an independent vision of the world.

In addition to the central interpretive essay, the catalogue also contains an essay on the various printings and dating of Wols’s photographs; an introduction to and translation of “The Photography of Wolfgang Schulz,” a 1932 text by the Dutch cultural critic H. van Loon; an extensive bibliography; and a checklist of the exhibition.

See press release
See exhibition information