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Lot Essay
Painted in 1947-1949, Le feu is one of Wols's last masterpieces created just a few years before the artist's death. One of only eighty paintings created during the artist's lifetime, it was exhibited at the XXIX Venice Biennale in 1958 and internationally at the Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1981), Kunsthaus Zurich (1989) and Fondation Cartier, Paris (1993). Many of his mature paintings, generally considered his most powerful and affective works are held in museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Menil Collection, Houston, Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Once described by friend and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre as the very embodiment of the 'existential artist', Wols distills onto canvas the very outpourings of his soul. Haunted by his experiences of internment at the outbreak of World War II and the sense of suspicion he faced as an 'enemy alien' living in Paris, his paintings became a clear reflection of his tortured mind. Towards the end of his life, he and his wife Gréty became increasingly impoverished; as she later recounted, 'we had no wood and could not make a fire so he sat down and painted both, the wood and the fire. He always painted his dreams like this, the good ones and the bad' (G. Wols quoted in K. Honnef et al., 'The Gentle Anarchist, Wolfgang Schulze: a German Artist in Paris', Art of the 20th Century, Cologne 2000, p. 250). In Le feu Wols's abstract image is created with a sense of abandon, the artist surrendering himself to the process of painting. Radiating from the centre and blazing through a sea of indigo blue is a heart of sanguine red pigment. Applied with an impassioned fervour and nervous filigree gestures, the image is captivating like the roaring fire of the work's title. Across the surface are grooves, eddies and rills of paint, scratched into the canvas with the wooden handle of a paintbrush. It is a dynamic, physical work operating at the highest emotional pitch, drawing parallels with the frenzied action painting of Jackson Pollock.
The father of Art Informel, Wols influenced a whole generation of artists with his impulsive musings plucked from his subconscious mind. As Georges Mathieu later professed: 'after Wols, everything has to be done afresh' (G. Mathieu quoted in K. Hartley, Wols: Paintings, exh. cat., The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, 1990, p. 6). Wols's aesthetic was born out of Surrealism's écriture automatique and Expressionists such as Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, yet he took these attitudes further, espousing an art free from all formal aesthetic criteria. In many respects, the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty as published in his Phenomenology of Perception found its expression in the artist's work. As Morris explained, 'the body was, [for] Merleau-Ponty, man's anchor in the world, the interface between consciousness and the world of object's and materials' (F. Morris, Paris Post War: Art and Existentialism 1945-55, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1993, p. 22). In Le feu the physical gestures of the artist's body and vigorously applied brushstrokes underline this concept, the expressive nature of the painting overturning the conventional order between image and materials.
As an émigré living in Paris after the liberation, Wols developed friendships with artists and luminaries including Joan Miró, Max Ernst, Alexander Calder, Tristan Tzara, Simone de Beauvoir, but above all with Jean-Paul Sartre who remained a companion to the troubled artist throughout his lifetime. Sartre first met Wols in 1945 and was intrigued by the air of tragedy surrounding him. As he once said of the painter: 'as a human being and, at the same time, as an inhabitant of Mars, Wols tries to see the world through disaffected eyes. In his opinion, this is the only way to give our experiences a universal value' (J. P. Sartre quoted in K. Honnef et al., 'The Gentle Anarchist, Wolfgang Schulze: a German Artist in Paris', Art of the 20th Century, Cologne 2000, p. 250).
Wols's first exhibition was held in December 1945 at the Galerie René Drouin, a gallery that played a significant part in promoting the work of contemporaries Jean Dubuffet and Jean Fautrier. For his show, Wols displayed a number of watercolours and produced a tiny catalogue with passages selected from Sartre's epistolary novel, Nausea. This close relationship between the artist and author, which can be regarded as a kind of creative and intellectual patronage, was quite common at the time, especially within the small community that developed around Saint-German-des-Prés. For their own part, the writers felt the importance of the visual arts in political and moral issues: Sartre developed a close relationship not only with Wols but also with Alberto Giacometti; Jean Paulhan became close to Antonin Artaud, Francis Ponge with Germaine Richier and Samuel Beckett with Bram van Velde. Common to all of these artists and in particular the works of Wols, Richier and Giacometti was their individual striving to reveal the depth of contemporary anguish. Giacometti's hieratic, solitary figures appeared like ciphers of the concentration camps whilst Richier's violent, organic effigies revealed a profound sense of pathos. Wols, with his urgent and highly gestured brush marks was diving into the depths of his own being, presenting his searing visions on canvas.
For artists living and working in Paris, the end of the War was filled with huge uncertainty, contemplating reconstruction of society after years of clandestine violence and oppression. As Charles de Gaulle was to famously recount, 'the withdrawing tide revealed all at once, from end to end of the country the ravaged body of France' (C. de Gaulle, Charles de Gaulle: Mèmoirs de Guerre, Volume III, Le Salut (1944-1946), Paris 1959, p. 1). For Wols, as for his contemporaries, art was to create a radical and definitive break with the past and all its failed promises of modernism. In Le feu, Wols undertakes this rupture, carrying out his own direct and penetrating catharsis, whilst recalling the words of Aimé Césaire: 'painting is one of the rare weapons we are left with to combat sordid history' (A. Césaire quoted in G. Viatte (ed.), Aftermath: France 1945-54, New Images of Man, exh. cat., The Barbican Centre, London, 1982, p. 43).
The father of Art Informel, Wols influenced a whole generation of artists with his impulsive musings plucked from his subconscious mind. As Georges Mathieu later professed: 'after Wols, everything has to be done afresh' (G. Mathieu quoted in K. Hartley, Wols: Paintings, exh. cat., The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, 1990, p. 6). Wols's aesthetic was born out of Surrealism's écriture automatique and Expressionists such as Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, yet he took these attitudes further, espousing an art free from all formal aesthetic criteria. In many respects, the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty as published in his Phenomenology of Perception found its expression in the artist's work. As Morris explained, 'the body was, [for] Merleau-Ponty, man's anchor in the world, the interface between consciousness and the world of object's and materials' (F. Morris, Paris Post War: Art and Existentialism 1945-55, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1993, p. 22). In Le feu the physical gestures of the artist's body and vigorously applied brushstrokes underline this concept, the expressive nature of the painting overturning the conventional order between image and materials.
As an émigré living in Paris after the liberation, Wols developed friendships with artists and luminaries including Joan Miró, Max Ernst, Alexander Calder, Tristan Tzara, Simone de Beauvoir, but above all with Jean-Paul Sartre who remained a companion to the troubled artist throughout his lifetime. Sartre first met Wols in 1945 and was intrigued by the air of tragedy surrounding him. As he once said of the painter: 'as a human being and, at the same time, as an inhabitant of Mars, Wols tries to see the world through disaffected eyes. In his opinion, this is the only way to give our experiences a universal value' (J. P. Sartre quoted in K. Honnef et al., 'The Gentle Anarchist, Wolfgang Schulze: a German Artist in Paris', Art of the 20th Century, Cologne 2000, p. 250).
Wols's first exhibition was held in December 1945 at the Galerie René Drouin, a gallery that played a significant part in promoting the work of contemporaries Jean Dubuffet and Jean Fautrier. For his show, Wols displayed a number of watercolours and produced a tiny catalogue with passages selected from Sartre's epistolary novel, Nausea. This close relationship between the artist and author, which can be regarded as a kind of creative and intellectual patronage, was quite common at the time, especially within the small community that developed around Saint-German-des-Prés. For their own part, the writers felt the importance of the visual arts in political and moral issues: Sartre developed a close relationship not only with Wols but also with Alberto Giacometti; Jean Paulhan became close to Antonin Artaud, Francis Ponge with Germaine Richier and Samuel Beckett with Bram van Velde. Common to all of these artists and in particular the works of Wols, Richier and Giacometti was their individual striving to reveal the depth of contemporary anguish. Giacometti's hieratic, solitary figures appeared like ciphers of the concentration camps whilst Richier's violent, organic effigies revealed a profound sense of pathos. Wols, with his urgent and highly gestured brush marks was diving into the depths of his own being, presenting his searing visions on canvas.
For artists living and working in Paris, the end of the War was filled with huge uncertainty, contemplating reconstruction of society after years of clandestine violence and oppression. As Charles de Gaulle was to famously recount, 'the withdrawing tide revealed all at once, from end to end of the country the ravaged body of France' (C. de Gaulle, Charles de Gaulle: Mèmoirs de Guerre, Volume III, Le Salut (1944-1946), Paris 1959, p. 1). For Wols, as for his contemporaries, art was to create a radical and definitive break with the past and all its failed promises of modernism. In Le feu, Wols undertakes this rupture, carrying out his own direct and penetrating catharsis, whilst recalling the words of Aimé Césaire: 'painting is one of the rare weapons we are left with to combat sordid history' (A. Césaire quoted in G. Viatte (ed.), Aftermath: France 1945-54, New Images of Man, exh. cat., The Barbican Centre, London, 1982, p. 43).