522 - Wols (Wolfgang Schulze)* ( Berlin 1912 - 1951 Paris )

Wols (Wolfgang Schulze)* ( Berlin 1912 - 1951 Paris ) Rouge Royal, 1963 etching/paper 28 x 21 cm numbered VI/XXV, signed in the plate Wols verso labeled Rouge Royal dated 1963 SCHÄTZPREIS / ESTIMATE € 100 - 200 STARTPREIS / STARTING PRICE € 100 Wols left Germany in 1932 and settled in Paris, where he initially worked as a largely self-taught photographer. His artist name originated in 1937 from the abbreviated spelling of his name in a telegram. In the Parisian art scene, he established connections with Max Ernst, Fernand Léger, and Jacques Prévert. Joan Miró and André Masson also serve as key reference points regarding the affinity of his early works with Surrealism, poetic imagery, and automatism. His photographs, drawings, and watercolors already reveal a distinctive visual language focused on chance, the observation of detail, and fragile linear structures. During the Second World War, Wols was interned in France as a German national. He continued to work on drawings and watercolors under difficult conditions. From 1946 onwards, encouraged by the gallerist René Drouin, he increasingly turned to oil painting; Drouin exhibited forty of his paintings in 1947. In that same post-war Parisian milieu, Jean Dubuffet and Jean Fautrier represented a radical renewal of painting, while Henri Michaux and Camille Bryen stood for line, automatism, and psychic pictorial spaces. Wols’s paintings are characterized by nervous networks of lines, scratch marks, drips, and transparently layered fields of color. His process-oriented approach to painting became a pioneering force for *Art Informel*, Tachism, and Lyrical Abstraction. Georges Mathieu, Hans Hartung, Gérard Schneider, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Jean-Michel Atlan, and Pierre Soulages represent key figures in this European post-war abstraction, while Nicolas de Staël offers a contrasting position. Alberto Giacometti, Jackson Pollock, Mark Tobey, and Antoni Tàpies serve as further points of comparison. Wols died in Paris in 1951; posthumously, his work became a crucial reference point for abstract post-war art. PLEASE NOTE: The purchase price consists of the highest bid plus the buyer's premium, sales tax and, if applicable, the fee of artists resale rights and platform fee. In the case of normal taxation (marked ° at the estimate), a premium of 24% is added to the highest bid. The mandatory sales tax is added to the sum of the highest bid, the buyer's premium and platform fee. This amounts to 13% for paintings, drawings, graphic works and sculptures and 20% for photographs and all other items. The buyer's premium amounts to 28% in case of differential taxation. The sales tax is included in the differential taxation.