Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze)[no title] c.1937-50

Wols nearly always worked on a small scale.

The effect is intense and delicate in this series

of etchings. The lines are woven into strange suggestions of body parts or microscopic life.

The writer Jean-Paul Sartre saw in such images the artist's obsessive fascination with the minutiae of nature. Wols himself wrote in a poetic piece:

'At Cassis, the pebbles, fish, rocks under a magnifying glass ¿ made me forget about human pretensions, invited me to turn my back

on the chaos of our goings-on, showed me eternity in the little harbour waves'.