Wols

The fantastical art of short-lived German painter and photographer Wolfgang Schulze (1913–51), known as Wols, draws viewers into a strange, miniature world, one that bridges Surrealism and abstract expressionism. This richly illustrated book offers the first comprehensive retrospective of Wols’s career in more than twenty years. It presents two hundred color images of the artist’s work—the majority drawn from private collections, and thus rarely seen in public. The paintings presented here make up more than one-third of his entire oeuvre, and they’re accompanied by drawings and aquarelles, which taken together show the artist’s evolution. We see him drawing on Surrealism and naive art, but then going beyond those schools to develop new forms of expression within abstract art. Essays by German and American scholars round out the volume, putting Wols’s achievement in its historical and artistic context.

The result is the most complete picture ever offered of Wols’s work, and it makes a strong case for his important place in twentieth-century art.