TY  - JOUR
  - Krčma, Ed
  - 2014
  - November
  - Oxford Art Journal
  - Wols and Smallness
  - Published
  - ()
  - Wols, Sartre, Art Informel, Existentialism, Santner, Creaturely Life, Scale, Drawing, Robert Walser
  - 37
  - 3
  - 1
  - 20
  - This paper examines the work of the German-born artist Wols in relation to the question of scale. It focuses upon the small, intricate drawings that Wols made in the mid-1940s, but also bears upon his close-up photographs of kitchen detritus from the late 1930s, as well as his poems and aphorisms. Situating Wols within the artistic and intellectual climate of France in the 1940s (and with particular reference to the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre and Gaston Bachelard), I explore how the teeming detail of his drawings, by encouraging very close looking into unfamiliar pictorial worlds, produces a sense of proximity and exposure. This, together with Wols’ obsessive, agitated facture, can usefully be analysed in terms of what Eric Santner has called ‘creaturely life’. In this respect, Wols’ work aligns more closely with the drawings of Henri Michaux and the ‘microscripts’ of Robert Walser than with the gestural abstraction of the New York School. Finally, I argue that the dramatization of the human rendered ‘creaturely’ not only has a particular purchase on the troubled conditions of Wols’ life, but also on the fate of the artwork cast adrift from the historical situation from which it emerged.
  - London
DA  - 2014/11
ER  - 

@article{V256972946,
   = {Krčma,  Ed },
   = {2014},
   = {November},
   = {Oxford Art Journal},
   = {Wols and Smallness},
   = {Published},
   = {()},
   = {Wols, Sartre, Art Informel, Existentialism, Santner, Creaturely Life, Scale, Drawing, Robert Walser},
   = {37},
   = {3},
  pages = {1--20},
   = {{This paper examines the work of the German-born artist Wols in relation to the question of scale. It focuses upon the small, intricate drawings that Wols made in the mid-1940s, but also bears upon his close-up photographs of kitchen detritus from the late 1930s, as well as his poems and aphorisms. Situating Wols within the artistic and intellectual climate of France in the 1940s (and with particular reference to the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre and Gaston Bachelard), I explore how the teeming detail of his drawings, by encouraging very close looking into unfamiliar pictorial worlds, produces a sense of proximity and exposure. This, together with Wols’ obsessive, agitated facture, can usefully be analysed in terms of what Eric Santner has called ‘creaturely life’. In this respect, Wols’ work aligns more closely with the drawings of Henri Michaux and the ‘microscripts’ of Robert Walser than with the gestural abstraction of the New York School. Finally, I argue that the dramatization of the human rendered ‘creaturely’ not only has a particular purchase on the troubled conditions of Wols’ life, but also on the fate of the artwork cast adrift from the historical situation from which it emerged.}},
   = {London},
  source = {IRIS}
}