A comprehensive exhibition of photographs, watercolors, and engravings by Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze, known as "Wols," whose dramatic life sandwiched between the two World Wars was presented by Jean-Paul Sartre as a "typical representative of the lost generation," seen as a "chronicle of sadness and pain," and evaluated as "evidence of the annihilation of human existence," was organized at the Millî Reasürans Art Gallery in collaboration with the Istanbul Goethe Institute and the ifa - Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations.

Born in 1913 in Berlin and died at the age of 38 in Paris in 1951, Wols, carefully raised as the child of a middle-class family, developed an interest in science, sports, and photography during his school years. His music teacher even thought he could become a violin virtuoso. However, as if sensing that life wouldn't offer him much chance, he chose the shortcut, dropping out of school without taking exams and starting to work alongside a photographer. He attended courses at Bauhaus for a while. By the time he was 19, he was in Paris, where he managed to find work as a photographer. At the age of 20, he embarked on a journey without a fixed destination with Gréty Dabija, a Hungarian woman whom he would later marry. Gréty had left her husband for this trip. This two-year period, mostly spent in Barcelona and Ibiza, ended with Wols' arrest and deportation to Paris. In 1937, he opened his first photography exhibition in Paris, mainly consisting of portraits.

When World War II started in 1939, he was arrested by the French Government due to being a German citizen and was held in various camps for 14 months. However, he was released when he married Gréty, who was a French citizen, and they settled in Cassis near Marseille. After this detention, Wols started to consume alcohol excessively. He attempted to go to America and sent around 100 of his works there. They were exhibited in New York in 1942. However, unable to go to America, Wols and Gréty fled once again, this time to Dieulefit, when Germany occupied Southern France in 1942.

Wols' watercolors and engravings were first exhibited in Paris in 1945 after the war. Wols and Gréty returned to Paris. In 1947, Drouin organized his second exhibition consisting of 40 works. By this time, Wols' health had started to deteriorate. Throughout 1947-48, he illustrated books by authors such as Sartre and Kafka. He died in Paris in 1951.

After coming to Paris in 1932, Wols, who quickly distanced himself from bourgeois values and aesthetics, carved out his own path. Despite the difficult conditions he faced and his alcohol addiction during detention, he managed to maintain and develop his creative power. However, although he started his artistic career as a photographer and worked in various fields such as watercolor and oil painting, drawing, and engraving, Wols was only remembered and widely accepted again with exhibitions held after 1978. Only a few of Wols' photographs, about 1800 negatives, have survived over time, and very few of them have been printed.

The article mentions that Wols' photographs are "subjective according to the style of the period, showing interest in objects and situations that are generally overlooked by looking at reality from an individual perspective and focusing on unexpected details to express personal reactions to the objects seen." It also suggests that Wols was within an extremely personalized "ultra-realist and abstract" artistic understanding, using contradictions consciously and effectively to move beyond reality into the realm of fantasy or from fantasy to reality, giving imaginative products the credibility of a new and different reality.

According to Rathke, Wols particularly pioneered developments in drawing and engraving, and his contemporaries followed his works: "The dominance of painting itself as a formal element in Wols' works recalls Jackson Pollock, who developed his own style in the US during the same period, and Mark Tobey, who gave his painting an expressionist structure. Moreover, these three artists, starting from different impulses and following different paths, created their own personal languages. The common point of the three is that they took Surrealism as their starting point and aimed to create a new art different from other abstraction types in terms of form and impact, and far from objectivity."

The exhibition at the Millî Reasürans Art Gallery and the published catalog offer Istanbul art enthusiasts a perhaps once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get to know this rebellious, pioneering, and "peintre maudit" or "cursed painter" of the 1930s and 40s up close. The exhibition can be visited from January 25th to February 25th, 2006.