COLOGNE.- Galerie Karsten Greve announces the exhibition Wols. Ewald Rathke Collection. The exhibition shows 15 works from the recently acquired collection of the Frankfurt art historian and art dealer and thus honours Ewald Rathke's extraordinary contribution to Wols' oeuvre. Presented together for the first time, the works on paper, executed in ink and watercolor, illustrate the epochal significance of his artistic work up to around 1945.


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Ewald Rathke (1926-2024) was an art historian with a doctorate in modern art with a focus on hand drawings, watercolors and graphic art; his dissertation entitled ''Bildnistypen bei Frans Hals'' [“Types of Portraits in the Work of Frans Hals”]. From 1959 to 1961, he co-managed the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf together with Karl-Heinz Hering. In 1961, Ewald Rathke was appointed director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein, where he organized exhibitions on Edvard Munch, Amedeo Modigliani and Vincent Van Gogh, among others. From today's perspective, the ground- breaking exhibition Wols. Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings, Photos at the Frankfurter Kunstverein in 1966 and the important documentary catalogue are due to Rathke's leadership. In 1970, he opened the Ewald Rathke art dealership in Frankfurt and established himself as a leading specialist for Wols' oeuvre, whereby his expertise in the authentication and evaluation of the artist's works is still decisive today.

The 15 works from the Ewald Rathke Collection span the politically and socially turbulent years 1939- 1945. The watercolour Untitled (Surrealist Composition) (c. 1939/40) shows a composition of geometric and organic forms. The pastel shades of pink, light blue and orange-red evoke the light and landscape of the Mediterranean. The work was created during Wols' internment in various civilian camps in the south of France. The shapes and colours convey lightness and playfulness, the forms reminiscent of flags and garlands refer to the thought context of dream and theatre and show Wols' artistic relationship to Surrealism. During his imprisonment, the artist developed the idea of Circus Wols, an alternative concept to the real world in a combination of art, music and cinema. Art became an escape and survival strategy for him and his artistic companions.

The soaring cityscape in Untitled (1941) seems to allude to the architecture and landscape of Cassis near Marseille, where Wols and his wife Hélène Marguerite - Gréty - Dabija lived from 1941-42. The interwoven lines convey confusion, with black shadows overlaying the pink and blue tones. Wols’ works increasingly reveal despair and misery; the artist struggles with poverty and alcoholism. Untitled (1944- 45) resembles a head with tumorous growths rising from the top. The supposed facial expression conveys despair, consternation and grief. By contrast, the diffuse and simultaneously enormous shapes in Le ver blanc (around 1944/45) and Le sanglier fou (around 1945) seem to anticipate the atomic catastrophes of 1945. In the works of Edgar Allen Poe, Antonin Artaud and Jean-Paul Satre, Wols finds literary equivalents of his thoughts and states of mind. The existentiality and impressive impact of the resulting works are an expression of the wounds of time and justify their timelessness.

“As for Wols, only doing-creating, his drawings and paintings, could respond to this fundamental demand of Dasein, the appalling finitude of historicity that no one escapes. ….“1

With Wols. Ewald Rathke Collection, Galerie Karsten Greve honors the important life's work of Ewald Rathke and continues its long-standing commitment to the oeuvre of Wols. Coinciding with Wols at Galerie Karsten Greve AG St. Moritz, the gallery is systematically continuing its series of exhibitions and publications on the artist. Karsten Greve and Galerie Karsten Greve would like to thank the estate of Dr. Ewald Rathke.

Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze, known as Wols, was born in Berlin in 1913 into a family of high-ranking civil servants. After moving to Dresden, Wols met important artists, such as Otto Dix and Leo Frobenius, and visited exhibitions of Oskar Kokoschka and Paul Klee. In 1932, Wols moved to Paris and frequented important artists' circles. After France's entry into the Second World War, he was declared an enemy alien and imprisoned in various civilian internment camps in France from 1939 to 1940 together with other artists and intellectuals, including Hans Bellmer and Max Ernst. Despite the adverse circumstances, Wols created brilliant drawings and watercolors during this time. Defended by numerous Parisian artists and writers, Wols remained in France during the war and continued to develop his artistic work until his death on September 1, 1951 at the age of 38. An exhibition in 1951 showed his works together with those of Jackson Pollock, marking a historic encounter between the French and American non-figurative schools. In 1958, his work was shown at the Venice Biennale and in 1964 at the documenta in Kassel. In 1974, the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris dedicated a retrospective to him, followed by the Kunsthaus Zürich and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein- Westfalen in Düsseldorf in 1989, and later the Menil Collection in Houston (2013) and the Center Pompidou in Paris (2020). His works can be found in the world's most important collections, such as the MoMA and the MET in New York, the Menil Collection in Houston, the Art Institute in Chicago, Tate London, the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Kunstmuseum Basel and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.


1 Francoise Le Gris. „Wols. An art of living in the world“ in Galerie Karsten Greve. Wols. Köln 2023. Pp. 13 – 20, p. 13.



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