Otto WOLS (1913-1951) - Lot 45

Lot n° 45
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Estimation :
2500 - 3500 EUR
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Result : 5 000EUR
Otto WOLS (1913-1951) - Lot 45
Otto WOLS (1913-1951) Rebus impossible, circa 1948-1949 Ink, watercolor and gouache. Signed lower right. 17 x 12cm Provenance Galerie Michel Couturier, 22 rue de Seine, 75006, Paris. Certificate from Michel Couturier dated December 7, 1968, registered in the gallery archives under no. 850. Born Wolfgang Schulze in Berlin in 1913, he renamed himself Otto Wols in 1937, a name he would use as his signature from then on. Self-taught, but also a photographer, engraver, painter, graphic artist and musician who was close to Surrealism in his early days, he is considered one of the pioneers of lyrical abstraction, tachism and informal art. Having fled Nazi Germany and taken refuge in the Balearic Islands, he was expelled and emigrated to Paris in 1935, where he received help from Fernand Léger and museologist Georges Henri Rivière. Between 1937 and 1939, he worked successfully as a fashion photographer. His photographic work is highly eclectic: portraits, urban landscapes, surrealist still lifes. He worked with Arp, Giacometti, Max Ernst, Jacques Prévert, Man Ray, Tzara and Calder. During and after the war, he worked with Henri-Pierre Roché, Jean Paulhan and Sartre. In 1940, he was interned as a stateless person at the Camp des Milles and produced a large number of surrealist watercolors. Henri-Pierre Roché describes Wols' art in the preface to the catalog of his May 1947 exhibition at Galerie René Drouin: "What does Wols do? He lets himself descend to the depths of himself like a diver, and his hand graffiti everything he sees: cobwebs, grasses, forests of seaweed, watches, mollusks, Russian city-mountains, houseboats, islands, butcher shops-jewelers, attractions, cracks and centers of fright. All this and more. He orders these visions in a crisis. I am grateful to him for diving in this way and showing us his catch."
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