Wols’s “accidental meetings”

“Wols: Photographs, Watercolors, Prints” is the title of a new exhibit at Kyiv’s Russian Art Museum, which features the works of Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze (1913-1951), the official photographer of the Paris International Exhibition and the first illustrator of texts by Arto, Sartre, and Kafka. Thanks to the Stuttgart-based Institute for Contacts Abroad and the Goethe Cultural Center in Kyiv, this is the first-ever exhibit of Wols’s works in Ukraine. Until now, few if any Ukrainian art lovers were familiar with his works.

Wols was an extraordinary and ambiguous figure. Within art circles some call Wols an “accursed artist” whose life was marked by conflicts with the bourgeois norms of the day; others say that he was representative of the “lost generation.” Still others call him “informal.” Indeed, in the 1950s Wols’s creative endeavors were extremely innovative; small wonder that his works were interpreted as a record of the devastations and disorders of man and his world. However, his experimentation with new techniques and his works, which were free of established artistic canons, correspond to the moods of that period.

In his photographs, watercolors, and prints Wols always tries to find an unusual point of view, selecting unexpected fragments of surrounding reality and strange interrelationships. He depicts objects that neither fit nor belong to each other. As a photographer, Wols takes pictures that evoke thoughts of unchangeability. It is as though everything has always been the same and will remain so. This is true of both his watercolor compositions and photographs of used clothing shop windows, walls with remnants of posters. His portraits show human figures in a state of utter relaxation, free of artificial or unnatural postures. As an artist, Wols mostly focuses on nature. He is attracted by details, animals and plants, rock, and often only by parts of organisms.

Wols doesn’t tell stories or depict events. He presents the viewer with accidental, unexpected encounters and creates artistic worlds. Traveling through them, we have an opportunity to learn about the moods and spiritual states of man.