The world of art has suffered a tragic loss. Renowned artist, Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze has passed away due to food poisoning. It is surely saddening to have lost such a upcomings srtist. For Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze was born in Berlin, Germany in 1913. Schulze was most commonly known as “Wols.” He was born
and raised into a wealthy family; his father was a high-ranking
patron of the arts who eveloped friendships with several
prominent artists of theperiod, including Otto Dix.
Wols found his love for art in 1927. Along with the death of his
influential father in 1929, Wols experienced one of the most
defining moments in his life. He channeled his emotions into
art and enlisted in Reiman-Schule, the Berlin school of applied
art. Because of his father's passing, Wols joined the
Existentialism movement and questioned life's meaning.
After struggling months, Wols abandoned Reiman-Schulze and moved to Paris. He worked several odd jobs including a taxicab driver and a German tutor. Beginning in 1937, Wols worked on photography and his works were displayed in many of Paris’s most prestigious galleries. As a German national, Wols was interned at the start of World War II, but he managed to escape and hide in Cassis near Marseilles, where he passed the time drawing and painting in watercolor.
He spent most of the war trying to immigrate to the United States, an unsuccessful and costly enterprise that may have driven him to alcoholism. Upon his return to Paris, after the hype from the war had died down, he had his first exhibition of watercolors in December 1945 at the Galerie René Drouin, where despite the lack of commercial success he made an impression on the circle of intellectuals around the gallery. His paintings represented a rejection of figuration and abstraction.
In the years following the war, Schulze concentrated on painting and etching. His health declined severely towards the end of the 1940s; in 1951 he died of food poisoning at the Hotel Montalembert in Paris, after releasing himself from hospital against medical advice.
May he rest in peace.
OBITUARIES
The Life of an Existential Artist:
Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze
1913-1951