Wols (Alfred Wolfgang Schulze) Biography

Wols was the pseudonym adopted by Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze (1913-1951), a German painter and photographer who was mainly active in France. Although largely unrecognised during his lifetime, he is now regarded as a pioneer of lyrical abstraction and one of the most influential figures in the Tachisme movement. He authored a book on art theory entitled Aphorismes de Wols.

Alfred Schulze was born in Berlin in 1913 into a prosperous family; his father was a senior civil servant and a patron of the arts, who fostered friendships with numerous eminent artists of the era, including Otto Dix. In 1919, the family relocated to Dresden, where, in 1927, Schulze discovered his passion for art. He received a camera in 1924, an event that, together with his father’s death in 1929, proved to be one of the defining moments of his life. In 1930, he began an apprenticeship with his camera at the Reiman-Schule, Berlin’s school of applied art. He was a versatile individual, adept at teaching German, painting, and taking portrait and landscape photographs.

After abandoning school, Schulze pursued several interests, including ethnography, before moving to Paris in 1932 on the advice of László Moholy-Nagy. After visiting Germany in 1933, he decided not to return, instead traveling to Barcelona, Mallorca, and Ibiza, where he worked odd jobs, including a stint as a taxicab driver and a German tutor. While he was in Barcelona, he did not listen to the call-up for the labour services in Germany and was arrested in Spain. He did not have a passport, so he spent a few months in prison in Barcelona.

In 1936, he received official permission to live in Paris with the help of Fernand Léger; 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, including Max Ernst and Jacques Prévert. As a German national, Schulze (like Ernst) was interned at the start of World War II, he was then incarcerated originally in the State de Colombes in Paris, and after that, he was moved from camp to camp, moving south until he reached his final camp at Camp des Miles where he passed the time drawing and painting in watercolour, but he managed to escape and hide in Cassis near Marseille. In 1942, he fled from the Germans to the safety of Montélimar.

He spent most of the war trying to emigrate to the United States, an unsuccessful and costly enterprise that may have driven him to alcoholism. Upon his return to Paris, after the hype from the war had died down, he had his first exhibition of watercolours in December 1945 at the Galerie René Drouin where, despite the lack of commercial success, he made an impression on the circle of intellectuals around the gallery. These included Jean Paulhan, Francis Ponge, Georges Limbour and André Malraux. The small works were displayed in light boxes. A second exhibition in the same gallery two years later saw greater recognition. His paintings represented a rejection of figuration and abstraction, and a projection into a metaphysical plane.

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 of food poisoning at the Hotel Montalembert in Paris, after releasing himself from hospital against medical advice. After his death, his works were shown at the Kassel documenta (1955), documenta II (1959) and documenta III (1964).