Wols was the pseudonym of Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze (May 27, 1913- September 1, 1951), a German painter and photographer predominantly active in France.
Noted for his etchings and for his use of stains (taches) of color dabbed onto the canvas (as exemplified by his painting Composition, c. 1950), Wols pioneered a new style of expressive abstraction. Though unrecognized in his lifetime, he is considered one of the most influential artists of the Tachisme movement.
The quotation To see, it is not necessary to know anything,...except how to see is attributed to him.
Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze was born in Berlin in 1913 into a wealthy family; his father was a high-ranking civil servant and patron of the arts who maintained friendships with many prominent artists of the period, including Otto Dix. In 1919, the family moved to Dresden. In 1924, Schulze was given a still camera, an event that, along with the death of his father in 1929, became one of the defining moments of his life.
After abandoning school, Schulze pursued several interests, including ethnography before moving to Paris on 1932 on the advice of László Moholy-Nagy. After visiting Germany in 1933, he decided not to return, instead traveling to Barcelona, Majorca, and Ibiza, where he worked odd jobs, including a stint as a taxicab driver and a German tutor.
In 1936, he received official permission to live in Paris with the help of Fernand Léger; as an army deserter, Schulze had to report to the Paris police on a monthly basis. Beginning in 1937, he actively worked on his photographs, which were shown in many of Paris's most prestigious galleries. He befriended luminaries of the period, including Max Ernst and Jacques Prévert. As a German national, Schulze (like Ernst) was interned at the start of World War II, but was released by 1940. He spent most of the war trying to emigrate to the United States, an unsuccessful and costly enterprise that may have driven him to alcoholism.
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 (ironically, he had just been released from a hospital).