Wols Photographs

At the Busch-Reisinger Museum

Through April 25

By Nadia Aymone Michelle Berenstein

CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Who is this Wols? Six grimacing self-portraits, the first images one encounters in the Busch-Reisinger Museum's exhibit of his photographs, prevent an immediate response. The portraits, cropped like busts from the neck up, span the varieties of human response, from the mirthful to the apathetic to the terrifying but never the genuine. This shock at lack of sentimentality is re-experienced in the 57 photographs displayed. In his most successful prints, he subverts the circumstantial reality of his subject and creates a new context without annihilating its essence.

Wols, the founder of the Informel movement, was almost exclusively known as a painter. Applying paint with fingers or knives, or directly from the tube, Wols created oils that confront the viewer head-on with their explosive colors and textured surfaces.

Until recently, Wols's photographs were seen as prefiguring his later work. Christine Mehring, who gracefully curates the exhibit, instead presents Wols's photography as an integral part of his oeuvre that must be considered independently. She divides his photographs into four discrete but contingent sections: portraits, abstractions, fashion photographs and still lives. As the works were taken during his ten-year residence in France between 1932 and 1942, they bear a strong stylistic affinity to each other. Yet the works display Wols's movement from germinal Bauhaus sterility and Surrealist tomfoolery to a style ultimately unique both from his contemporaries and from his later works on canvas.

Wols's photograph of his close friend Nicole Bouban (pictured) is the most visually compelling portrait displayed. Reclining on a pillow whose filigreed embroideries of butterflies merge with the platinum waves of her hair, Bouban's marmoreal face achieves the vacuity of expression associated with mannequins or dolls. Her smooth skin seems carved out of soap. But Wols's depiction is more than a trite objectification of a woman's face. Though she is reclining, this is not an image of repose. He effects the same response as that engendered in his self-portraits: the image is impossible to penetrate. Aside from the details of her features, one cannot learn anything about her; her expression resists psychological classification.

In his other portraits, Wols uses dark shadows and flat planes to occlude the subjects' faces. But in Nicole Bouban, he strips the face of its conventional revelatory implications without resorting to heavy-handed assaults on the planes of her beauty.

Wols's abstractions are scenes of the everyday realities of Paris life. Influenced by Moholy-Nagy and other Bauhaus aestheticians, they reveal the abstraction inherent in commonplace details. When figures are used, as in Untitled (Clochard) ,their human identity is obscured. Bodies become compositional elements, mere surfaces for the interplay of shadows. Other images, such as the stunning Untitled (Bucket), utilize light to create form. The water in the bucket has a metallic shimmer to it, suggesting a solidified surface. Wols skillfully contrasts the texture of the rags' ribbing with the placidity of the water to create an image of restive calm.

His work for the fashion pavilion at the 1937 Paris World's Fair continues his studies of the form and figure. The Surrealist ambitions of Couturier's De Chirico-like mannequins, with their featureless faces and heavily textured plaster surface, apparently appealed to Wols. Cloth is more carved than draped as the mannequins cavort and tremble at their shadows, which chase them among the neoclassical columns that decorated their stages and pedestals.

His still lives are unequivocally the most inventive and mysterious photographs of the exhibition. He retreats from the streets to the kitchen. But his foodstuffs are neither palatable nor tantalizing. Distorted in scale, lit by mysterious sources and seeming almost alive, these photographs disturb as much as they entice. There are no rites of passage into this world of objects. These depart from his earlier, formalist, abstractions: they are abstraction vivified.

Some of the objects that Wols photographs (like the hesitatingly named Untitled (Rolled Cheese)) are unidentifiable except as organic forms. Others, like Untitled (Lamp and Branch with Meat) and Untitled (Rabbit/Comb/Button), have been cast in roles that are alien to their natures. But in his most successful still lives, Untitled (Beans) and Untitled (Sausage and Potatoes), Wols takes his subjects out of our world, while retaining their physical presence (the shine of an overboiled potato, the turgid undulations of a bean's matte surface) and signifiers of the setting (the rounded edge of a table, the gleam of a pan's lid). More alive than the subjects of his portraits, the beans commune and swarm, the potatoes and sausage hold a brief rapport. He destroys the world we know these objects from and conjures another in its place. The foodstuffs occupy a distinct and independent reality: familiar, yet alien.

Because of financial difficulties during his lifetime and the initial lack of interest, very few of Wols's vintage prints exist. Those that are extant are often water-damaged or scratched. Because of the scarcity of originals, most of the prints displayed were made by photographic historians Volker Kamen and Georg Heusch in 1976. These contemporary prints replicate the state of the original negatives: minor scratches and imperfections are seen on the surface of most of the prints. The contemporary prints are framed by the black lines of the negative holder, reminding us that the artist, who would have had the freedom to enlarge or crop, had no hand in their production.

The difficult choice to use Heusch's prints seems the appropriate one. Heusch's prints guess at the artist's intentions as minimally as possible; one can assume that the integrity of his intentions are not disturbed.