Wols

Wols: Cosmos and Street. From February 13  to May 26, 2014

Guy Brett, curator: Wols was an interesting person: his history, personal history, is very telling, very interesting...

Certainly, it's quite clear that Sartre thought that Wols was a kind of embodiment of existentialism, his predicament... And his predicament has been considered to lie behind the protagonist for Sartre's La nausée, his first novel I think. But that's how Sartre saw Wols.

You know, Wols produced different kinds of work in different periods in his life, for many different reasons. I mean, sometimes he just needed to make a living and so he developped his photography. Then, During the Second World War, when he was leading this really very precarious existence in Germany and France, at the outbreak of war, during the war, continually being kind of displaced to different parts of the French countryside... small towns -and even prison for a while- because he was considered to have deserted the German army by coming to France and so on.
So if you look at his production you can see that on the one hand he made some very original work in photography, and on the other hand he practiced a formal drawing watercolor -you know- very much in tradition... but it didn't turn out to be a tradition but a practice which was very individual to him, and was a part of his way of dealing with these kind of brutalities and privations of the war. So a lot of his photographs are actually pieces of food, cheap food that some poor person would have to buy. And he focused on these objects with great intensity and material closeness, you know.

But he seemed to stop, gradually stop taking photographs as the war came along. He started to work in a way that he could, in a situation very often… drawing lying in bed, which he went on doing after the war, in the Paris years, while he was in Paris.

Again he was on the move constantly, from one sort of cheap hotel to another, but in those hotel rooms he would be lying in bed, making his drawings of the kind that we see in the exhibition, minutely detailed, and one just can imagine him to be propped up in bed, with his little sort of very fine little tools and brushes and things that he had. And he was surrounded by musical instruments: his banjo and other string instruments, 'cause he was very into music.

So these different forms seem to give the opportunity to explore Wols's work in connection with the relationship between the cosmos as something unimaginably vast or unimaginably minute on the one hand, and pertaining to the infinite and this sort of everyday reality of human life in all its messiness. That's why it’s called Wols: Cosmos And Street.