Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Representing “Actuality”, Michael Schreyach

Art and Art History Faculty Research

In an effort to challenge some prevailing assumptions surrounding the art of the painter Wols—whose work various critics in the late 1940s associated with the expression of existential unease—Alex Potts proposes that what Wols truly wished to convey was “a real sense of the substance of the world,” its “bare non-art materiality” (119–20). An anecdote supplied by the critic René Guilly on the occasion of Wols’s 1947 Paris exhibition provides some evidence for that contention, even as it reveals the artist’s feelings of inadequacy in the face of his task. Walking by a decomposing wall glimpsed through a pane of …