Paris, 1947. In Wols’s studio, paint flows, splatters, and claws at the canvas. The artist works urgently, almost in a trance. Against the ochre background of “Yellow Composition,” something organic takes shape—or loses it.
A Painting That Breathes
Observe this tormented surface. Red lines traverse the canvas like raw nerves. Black stains burst forth, drips descend, scratches reveal successive layers of matter. Wols does not seek to represent: he lets the paint live its own existence.
The diffuse forms evoke a fragmented skull, a decomposed face, perhaps a torn animal head. Every gesture counts. Each brushstroke, each contact with the still-wet paint recounts the creative process itself. The yellowish, earthy background amplifies this impression of living, almost biological matter.
Pioneer of Art Informel
In 1952, critic Michel Tapié christened this new pictorial language: Tachisme, a major branch of Art Informel. Wols was one of its essential precursors. After World War II, abstraction reinvented itself simultaneously in Europe and the United States. In 1946, dealer René Drouin, captivated by Wols’s wartime watercolors, provided him with canvases and oil paints. “Yellow Composition” emerged from this dazzling creative period, where gesture replaced figuration.
Wols
A recognized photographer before becoming a painter, Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze, known as Wols (1913-1951), brought to his canvases a particular sensitivity to texture and detail. His radical approach influenced an entire generation of Lyrical Abstraction artists.
Think about it
💭 Faced with this controlled chaos, what emotion arises in you: fascination or unease before this fragmented beauty?
About This Work
- Yellow Composition
- Wols
- circa 1947
- Oil on canvas
- 73 × 92 cm
- Nationalgalerie, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin
- https://recherche.smb.museum/detail/960263/composition-jaune
