Lot 282 D

Wols was in the habit of not dating his works; for this reason it is only certain that the present early watercolour is from the Parisian period before the artist's internment when the war broke out in 1939. He also had a habit of not always signing his works and thus, according to Ewald Rathke, it is not entirely unusual to find sheets by the artist on which his name has been added at a later time, sometimes in someone else's hand. For a long time the present watercolour was assigned to the years 1938/1939; Ewald Rathke has currently once again confirmed the sheet as one of the earliest among the group of the few abstract ink-brush drawings from the Parisian period between 1937 and 1939. It was entitled “Le placard” by someone other than the artist, and this may point to the artistic connection Lazlo Glozer has established between this work and Wols's contemporary photographs. It was Wols who discovered the poster walls, advertising panels and particularly the torn-off posters (see comparative ill.) in the streets of Paris during these years. “The discovery of the surface of the poster walls - which had been turned into wild abstract images through the tearing off of their posters - as a 'picture plane': for him this must have initially been a sensation of the first magnitude, because he attempted to transpose this experience, with recollections of Kandinsky, of course, into several preserved watercolours.” (Laszlo Glozer, Wols Photograph, op. cit., p. 67). In the drawing it is evident that Wols was gesturally realising something which had first fascinated his eye through a different medium.
“The photos from the thirties already exhibit the intention of using a new perspective to transform the real, to go beyond the optically perceptible and to use what is distinctive to an object, an arrangement, to reveal the unconscious. [...] Wols is above all a draughtsman. However, he never uses line in order to describe content through its contours, instead, it speaks through its own motion. It emerges as an act of the hand; it is the trace of the experience.” (Ewald Rathke, Zur Kunst von Wols, in: exhib. cat., Wols, Kunst- u. Museumsverein Wuppertal 1966, n.p.).