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©
VEGAP, Madrid
Wols

The City

1950 - 1951
Gouache, ink and watercolor on Paper.
21 x 16.5 cm
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Inv. no.
786
(
1975.19
)
Not on display
  • Level 2 Permanent Collection
  • Level 1 Permanent Collection
  • Level 0 Carmen Thyssen Collection and Temporary exhibition rooms
  • Level -1 Temporary exhibition rooms, Conference room and EducaThyssen workshop
Level 2
Permanent Collection
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 14 13 15 16 17 18 22 19 20 21 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 Recommended start of the visitClassical rooms
1 14th Century. Early Italian Painting 2 15th Century. German and Spanish Painting 3 15th Century. Early Netherlandish Painting 4 15th Century. Italian Painting 5 15th and 16th Centuries. Renaissance Portraiture 6 16th Century. Villahermosa Gallery 7 16th Century. Italian Painting 8 15th and 16th Centuries. German Painting 9 15th and 16th Centuries. German Painting 10 16th Century. Netherlandish Painting 11 Tiziano, Tintoretto, Bassano and  El Greco 12 17th Century. Caravaggio and Baroque Painting 13 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 14 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 15 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 16 18th Century. Italian Painting 17 18th Century. Italian Painting 18 18th Century. Italian Painting 19 Classical rooms 20 Classical rooms 21 Classical rooms 22 18th Century. Italian Painting 23 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 24 18th Century. French and English Painting 25 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Scenes of Daily Life and Interiors 26 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 27 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Portrait 28 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 29 19th Century. European Painting. Goya and Romanticism  
Level 1
Permanent Collection
30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 Postpop rooms Rodin room
30 18th and 19th Centuries. Transatlantic Relations 31 19th Century. American Landscape and Environmental Awareness 32 19th Century. American Landscape and Urban Life 33 Recovering the ligth. Restoration of Waterloo Bridge, by André Derain 34 20th Century. Expressionist Landscapes 35 20th Century. Expressionist Portraits 36 20th Century. The Language of the Body 37 20th Century. Urban unrest 38 20th Century. Flowers 39 20th Century. Pioneers of abstraction 40 20th Century. Popular flavor 41 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition I 42 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition II 43 20th Century. Abstract Utopias 44 20th Century. Dada and Surrealism 45 20th Century. Interwar Realisms 46 20th Century. American Abstraction I 48 20th Century. Post-ward American Art 49 20th Century. Post-ward European Figurative Art 50 20th Century. Informalisms 51 20th Century. Homo Ludens 52 20th Century. Pop Art 53 Postpop rooms 54 Postpop rooms 55 Postpop rooms 56 Postpop rooms Rodin Exhibition room
Level 0
Carmen Thyssen Collection and Temporary exhibition rooms
A B C D E F G H I J Hall Temporary exhibition rooms Access to Permanent Collection Entrance Access to Carmen Thyssen Collection Paseo del Prado Garden
A 17th and 18th Centuries. Old Masters B 19th Century. North American Landscape C 19th Century. French Naturalist Landscape D 19th Century. Impressionism E 19th Century. Monet and North American Impressionism F 19th Century. Gauguin and Postimpressionism G 19th and 20th Centuries. Neo Impressionism and its Wake H 20th Century. Early Avant-gardes I 20th Century. Between the Wars Painting. Cubism, Abstraction and Surrealism J 20th Century. North American Painting and Others • HALL
Level -1
Temporary exhibition rooms, Conference room and EducaThyssen workshop
Temporary exhibition rooms Conference room EducaThyssen Workshop
Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze, whose pseudonym was Wols, fled Germany in 1933 following the arrival of Nazism and spent the remainder of his short existence between France and Spain, always an outsider, living on the fringes of society. In 1951 the critic Michel Tapié included him in the 1951 exhibition Vehemences confrontées, a comparison of the non-figurative trends in French, American and Italian painting, and he soon became one of the forerunners of informal abstraction, sometimes called Tachism.

Wols’s calligraphic abstraction — a peculiar mix of poetic, oriental and Surrealist influence — also reveals the mark of Klee’s psychic improvisation and the automatism of Miró, Tanguy and Masson, as well as the so-called psychoanalytical drawings of Jackson Pollock. However, despite sharing many features with certain informal languages, Wols, a follower of the Taoist philosopher who aspired to at-oneness with nature, never severed his links with the real world.

As evidenced in The City, a small and delicate work on paper belonging to the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Wols’s cities are not idyllic places but rather, as Werner Haftmann has written, “enigmatic cities that haunted the dreams of Kafka and Kubin.” The absence of human life is offset by a phantasmagorical universe swept up in a turbulence that causes it to close in on itself. As in other watercolours from his final period, the gestural, automatic brushwork became more spontaneous and the mesh of small dots and intricate lines drawn in India ink envelop the watercolour background. Like most of his paintings, this bewildering image may be considered an expression of his state of mind, which his writer friend Jean-Paul Sartre defined in existentialist terms: “His life was like a string of battered, unmatched beads, each one of which incarnated the world. As he used to say himself, it didn’t matter where you broke the string.”

Paloma Alarcó
20th Centurys. XX - Abstracción en la posguerra europeaWork on paperGouache, ink and watercolorPaper
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Tours to find it

Houses on the River (The Old Town). Casas junto al río. La ciudad vieja, 1914
Tours
Invisible Cities

A tour of cities represented, imagined and narrated, establishing a dialogue between the novel Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino.

Products and publications

Max Beckmann, figuras del exílio. Exhibition catalogue. Paperback Spanish language edition.

Max Beckmann, figuras del exílio. Exhibition catalogue. Paperback Spanish language edition.

9.50 €

Catalog Walid Raad: Cotton Under My Feet (English)

Catalog Walid Raad: Cotton Under My Feet (English)

25.00 € 23.75 €

De Palacio Villahermosa a Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. Historia de un edificio

De Palacio Villahermosa a Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. Historia de un edificio

28.00 € 15.50 €

Arte Americano en la Colección Thyssen (Exhibition catalogue. Spanish)

Arte Americano en la Colección Thyssen (Exhibition catalogue. Spanish)

39.00 € 25.00 €

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Mediterranean Landscape
1953
Karel Appel
Karel Appel
Wild Horses
1954
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The City. La ciudad, 1950-1951
The City
Wols

©

VEGAP, Madrid

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The exploitation rights of the images correspond to the Fundacion Coleccion Thyssen-Bornemisza, F.S.P. The Fundación authorizes the downloading of high-resolution images from its website for private use, use for educational and research purposes and non-commercial uses.

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The City. La ciudad, 1950-1951
The City
Wols

©

VEGAP, Madrid

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