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Lot Essay
L'inachevée is arguably Wols' final pictorial statement. A famous work exhibited at almost all the important exhibitions of Wols' work over the last half-century, it is one of the largest, most ambitious and ultimately, most poignant of the artist's great last series of paintings - the hauntingly powerful group of oils he made between 1947 and 1951. As its title suggests, L'inachevée is the painting that was left forever, perhaps even deliberately, unfinished hanging above Wols' bed in the small house in Champigny-sur-Marne at the time of his tragic death, aged 38, in September 1951.
Larger, more intricate, colourful, complex and joyous than many of the works in this series that preceded it, L'inachevée is one of the artist's final acts in this extraordinary and culminating group of pictures into which the whole gruesome entirety of Wols' frenetic and dissipating life in the post-war years, seemed to have been so unsparingly and determinedly emptied.
Widely regarded as among the most original and influential series of paintings to be made in Europe at this time, Wols' late series of oils is today considered to be one of the most important bodies of work from the immediate post-war era and many examples from this series now hang in museums such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Menil Collection Houston, the Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.
Neither abstract nor realist in any conventional sense of these terms, but hovering somewhere between these two realms, L'inachevée, like many of Wols' late oil paintings, is a work that asserts its own unique pictorial reality or, to coin a term from the Existentialists, who so revered and championed Wols at this time, its own 'facticity'. Like the paintings of Wols' American counterpart, Jackson Pollock, whose similar struggle with alcoholism, tragic early death and gutsy freeform style of painting has led to many comparisons between the two artists, L'inachevée, is an explosive work that records and celebrates the actions of its own making. But unlike the works of Pollock - who famously claimed that he was himself 'Nature' - Wols pictures are not 'action paintings'. L'inachevée is not an unconsciously produced work of automatism tapping into the unseen fluid forces and material of nature but rather an agitated, fiercely controlled and deeply conscious painterly construction built intuitively and impulsively as if from within the inherent structures of nature itself. Like each of Wols' oil paintings, L'inachevée marks and records a journey into the depths of the artist's psyche and the visceral nature of the moment within which it has been created. The energetic sweeps of Wols' brush, gnarled encrustations of paint and electrifying scratches, smudges and smears of the artist's last series of works all seem to echo and reconstitute vague references to similar forms and structures found in the natural world. Never specific or representational, it is as if the pictorial laws of this painting were operating on some hidden, microbiological level. Together all these disparate and frenetic elements combine to build dramatic, visceral and neurological explosions of form, colour and matter in a way that, when concentrated at the picture's epicentre, appear to pulsate with the vigorous and often frightening vitality of life itself.
As the poet and philosopher Botho Strauss has written of Wols, the artist paints 'the explosion of the brain's activity', 'neurological impulses' and the 'process of perceiving itself', the 'whole flow' as if it were 'immune' against the 'whole outer perception' (B. Straus, Das Partikular, Munich, 2000, p. 224). It is in this way too, in asserting so strongly the primal underground forces of nature and life, that Wols' paintings also seem to become inexorably caught up with the artist's extraordinary biography as if they were a kind of visceral exorcism of the artist's haunted mind and troubled life. It was as such pictorial totems of the absurd and tortuous nature of existence that Wols' paintings were first championed by Jean-Paul Sartre, who befriended Wols in the early 1940s and famously declared him to be the foremost painter of Existentialism. And, it is indeed, in this context that L'inachevée, Wols' seemingly last, great, unfinished masterpiece, has come to be seen as one of the central icons of the artist's brief but also somehow triumphant existence.
Most of Wols' works were untitled during his lifetime. Like the majority of his last series of oils, the poignant and feminine title of L'inachevée seems to have been bestowed on this painting, along with the auspicious inscription of its date 'end of August 1951' by Wols' wife Gréty after the artist's death. It is an ironic feature of Wols' story, but again somewhat fitting in the context of his legend as an artist maudit, that it was in the immediate aftermath of his death that he very quickly became recognised not only as a truly original and undiscovered talent, but also as the founding father of a wholly new style of painting, Art Informel. 'After Wols', the Tachist painter Georges Matthieu declared, 'everything has to be done afresh' (G. Matthieu quoted in Wols, Paintings, exh. cat, Edinburgh 1990, p. 6).
In its colour and also its relatively large scale, L'inachevée is a work that stands alone among Wols' last paintings. In a reminiscence published in 2002 by Gréty Wols' third husband, Marc Johannes, he records how Gréty recalled for him the extraordinary circumstances surrounding the genesis of the picture in this regard, and also how, perhaps, its title refers not so much to its incomplete or unfinished nature as to the bare, white unpainted and unfinished-looking canvas area at the centre of the work which Wols, she claimed, especially liked. Gréty's fascinating and deeply atmospheric story, which, also unusually, provides the work with a distinctly figurative and personal origin, does contain a few inconsistencies. In August 1951, Dora Maar was no longer in regular contact with Picasso and Gréty's reminiscence does also not explain how, if Wols was so content with the finished work - claiming, 'I don't want to touch it anymore, now' - it later came to be titled (by her) as L'inachevée and dated as deriving from the very last days of Wols' life.
The story, recorded by Marc Johannes, as Gréty told it to him, many years later, runs as follows:
'It is known that Wols - without canvases, without money - painted only on small and often old canvases which the janitors had found in the trash and which they sold on to Gréty for a small sum...The painting L'inachevée however had quite a different history: Gréty, working as a hat maker, knowing everyone and being received everywhere, was one day at Dora Maar's for a hatIn front of a pile of new canvases for Picasso which were leaning against the wall, Gréty said 'Ah, if only Wols could have such big canvases!' Dora Maar immediately offered her a canvas and asked her: 'how are you ever going to take it home?'. 'Just like that!', was Gréty's reply. She took the canvas and disappeared behind it. It was not heavy but bulky! ...Taking the Metro she took it to the thrilled Wols without damage. 'Now all we need is a fine bottle,' said Wols, 'Go and get one!' 'We haven't a penny left,' Gréty replied, 'but you won't have to wait long, I am delivering Suzy's hat at midday today' (Suzy Solidor was singing in the Cabaret then). To kill time until then, Gréty put on the hat in front of the mirror, sitting in her costume on the only big mattress in the room. Wols asked, 'What is that? She will never like the hat, she already looks like a Dragoon!'. 'Don't be mean,' replied Gréty. 'She is a great artist and this hat is for on stage.' Gréty, still sitting on the bed, hat on her head, started plucking the hair from her chin. Wols started laughing: 'If you could only see yourself! One could start to think you are cross-eyed you really don't have a big forehead! Listen, give me the large canvas, I know what I will do, I don't see you like this very often'. Gréty too did not see Wols laughing very often. He sang and attacked the canvas all excited. He stood with his brushes on the bed, and after half an hour he lay down again with his banjo: 'I don't want to touch it anymore now. This is you, your hat, I like the white canvas still showing through'. Gréty answered 'Yes, I love the painting too, it is magical you don't paint as happily that very often. For me it is the only cheerful painting in your entire body of work'. Wols responded. 'That may be right, but what do you want, one lives to see more filth than anything else!', 'That is true, my dear,' said Gréty, 'but you will see, the painting is great, it can emanate everything, modernity and antiquity. Drouin will go crazy for it' to which Wols answered, 'Please let me keep it for a little, leave it here, your Drouin is already taking everything from us...' (G. Wols in conversation with Marc Johannes (Natalie Radziwil (trans.) quoted in Im Blickfeld: Wols, Komposition, exh. cat., Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg 2002, p. 45.)
Larger, more intricate, colourful, complex and joyous than many of the works in this series that preceded it, L'inachevée is one of the artist's final acts in this extraordinary and culminating group of pictures into which the whole gruesome entirety of Wols' frenetic and dissipating life in the post-war years, seemed to have been so unsparingly and determinedly emptied.
Widely regarded as among the most original and influential series of paintings to be made in Europe at this time, Wols' late series of oils is today considered to be one of the most important bodies of work from the immediate post-war era and many examples from this series now hang in museums such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Menil Collection Houston, the Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.
Neither abstract nor realist in any conventional sense of these terms, but hovering somewhere between these two realms, L'inachevée, like many of Wols' late oil paintings, is a work that asserts its own unique pictorial reality or, to coin a term from the Existentialists, who so revered and championed Wols at this time, its own 'facticity'. Like the paintings of Wols' American counterpart, Jackson Pollock, whose similar struggle with alcoholism, tragic early death and gutsy freeform style of painting has led to many comparisons between the two artists, L'inachevée, is an explosive work that records and celebrates the actions of its own making. But unlike the works of Pollock - who famously claimed that he was himself 'Nature' - Wols pictures are not 'action paintings'. L'inachevée is not an unconsciously produced work of automatism tapping into the unseen fluid forces and material of nature but rather an agitated, fiercely controlled and deeply conscious painterly construction built intuitively and impulsively as if from within the inherent structures of nature itself. Like each of Wols' oil paintings, L'inachevée marks and records a journey into the depths of the artist's psyche and the visceral nature of the moment within which it has been created. The energetic sweeps of Wols' brush, gnarled encrustations of paint and electrifying scratches, smudges and smears of the artist's last series of works all seem to echo and reconstitute vague references to similar forms and structures found in the natural world. Never specific or representational, it is as if the pictorial laws of this painting were operating on some hidden, microbiological level. Together all these disparate and frenetic elements combine to build dramatic, visceral and neurological explosions of form, colour and matter in a way that, when concentrated at the picture's epicentre, appear to pulsate with the vigorous and often frightening vitality of life itself.
As the poet and philosopher Botho Strauss has written of Wols, the artist paints 'the explosion of the brain's activity', 'neurological impulses' and the 'process of perceiving itself', the 'whole flow' as if it were 'immune' against the 'whole outer perception' (B. Straus, Das Partikular, Munich, 2000, p. 224). It is in this way too, in asserting so strongly the primal underground forces of nature and life, that Wols' paintings also seem to become inexorably caught up with the artist's extraordinary biography as if they were a kind of visceral exorcism of the artist's haunted mind and troubled life. It was as such pictorial totems of the absurd and tortuous nature of existence that Wols' paintings were first championed by Jean-Paul Sartre, who befriended Wols in the early 1940s and famously declared him to be the foremost painter of Existentialism. And, it is indeed, in this context that L'inachevée, Wols' seemingly last, great, unfinished masterpiece, has come to be seen as one of the central icons of the artist's brief but also somehow triumphant existence.
Most of Wols' works were untitled during his lifetime. Like the majority of his last series of oils, the poignant and feminine title of L'inachevée seems to have been bestowed on this painting, along with the auspicious inscription of its date 'end of August 1951' by Wols' wife Gréty after the artist's death. It is an ironic feature of Wols' story, but again somewhat fitting in the context of his legend as an artist maudit, that it was in the immediate aftermath of his death that he very quickly became recognised not only as a truly original and undiscovered talent, but also as the founding father of a wholly new style of painting, Art Informel. 'After Wols', the Tachist painter Georges Matthieu declared, 'everything has to be done afresh' (G. Matthieu quoted in Wols, Paintings, exh. cat, Edinburgh 1990, p. 6).
In its colour and also its relatively large scale, L'inachevée is a work that stands alone among Wols' last paintings. In a reminiscence published in 2002 by Gréty Wols' third husband, Marc Johannes, he records how Gréty recalled for him the extraordinary circumstances surrounding the genesis of the picture in this regard, and also how, perhaps, its title refers not so much to its incomplete or unfinished nature as to the bare, white unpainted and unfinished-looking canvas area at the centre of the work which Wols, she claimed, especially liked. Gréty's fascinating and deeply atmospheric story, which, also unusually, provides the work with a distinctly figurative and personal origin, does contain a few inconsistencies. In August 1951, Dora Maar was no longer in regular contact with Picasso and Gréty's reminiscence does also not explain how, if Wols was so content with the finished work - claiming, 'I don't want to touch it anymore, now' - it later came to be titled (by her) as L'inachevée and dated as deriving from the very last days of Wols' life.
The story, recorded by Marc Johannes, as Gréty told it to him, many years later, runs as follows:
'It is known that Wols - without canvases, without money - painted only on small and often old canvases which the janitors had found in the trash and which they sold on to Gréty for a small sum...The painting L'inachevée however had quite a different history: Gréty, working as a hat maker, knowing everyone and being received everywhere, was one day at Dora Maar's for a hatIn front of a pile of new canvases for Picasso which were leaning against the wall, Gréty said 'Ah, if only Wols could have such big canvases!' Dora Maar immediately offered her a canvas and asked her: 'how are you ever going to take it home?'. 'Just like that!', was Gréty's reply. She took the canvas and disappeared behind it. It was not heavy but bulky! ...Taking the Metro she took it to the thrilled Wols without damage. 'Now all we need is a fine bottle,' said Wols, 'Go and get one!' 'We haven't a penny left,' Gréty replied, 'but you won't have to wait long, I am delivering Suzy's hat at midday today' (Suzy Solidor was singing in the Cabaret then). To kill time until then, Gréty put on the hat in front of the mirror, sitting in her costume on the only big mattress in the room. Wols asked, 'What is that? She will never like the hat, she already looks like a Dragoon!'. 'Don't be mean,' replied Gréty. 'She is a great artist and this hat is for on stage.' Gréty, still sitting on the bed, hat on her head, started plucking the hair from her chin. Wols started laughing: 'If you could only see yourself! One could start to think you are cross-eyed you really don't have a big forehead! Listen, give me the large canvas, I know what I will do, I don't see you like this very often'. Gréty too did not see Wols laughing very often. He sang and attacked the canvas all excited. He stood with his brushes on the bed, and after half an hour he lay down again with his banjo: 'I don't want to touch it anymore now. This is you, your hat, I like the white canvas still showing through'. Gréty answered 'Yes, I love the painting too, it is magical you don't paint as happily that very often. For me it is the only cheerful painting in your entire body of work'. Wols responded. 'That may be right, but what do you want, one lives to see more filth than anything else!', 'That is true, my dear,' said Gréty, 'but you will see, the painting is great, it can emanate everything, modernity and antiquity. Drouin will go crazy for it' to which Wols answered, 'Please let me keep it for a little, leave it here, your Drouin is already taking everything from us...' (G. Wols in conversation with Marc Johannes (Natalie Radziwil (trans.) quoted in Im Blickfeld: Wols, Komposition, exh. cat., Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg 2002, p. 45.)