Wols – “Das Maß der Handfläche ist heilig”: Aquarelle, Zeichnungen und Druckgraphik 1936–1949 is an exhibition catalogue

edited by art historian Andreas Kreul documenting a selection of works on paper by the artist Wols (born Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze, 1913–1951). Published in 2001 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the artist’s death, the volume accompanies an exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bremen that highlights Wols’s watercolors, drawings, and graphic prints created between 1936 and 1949. The catalogue brings together a focused overview of Wols’s experiments with watercolor, ink drawing, and print media during his formative and mid-career years — a period shaped by his movement between Paris and southern France and by his engagement with Surrealism and emerging abstract tendencies. The title phrase, “Das Maß der Handfläche ist heilig,” (literally “The measure of the palm of the hand is sacred”) evokes the intimate, subjective scale at which these works operate, bridging the personal and the universal through expressive mark-making and pictorial invention. With essays and documentation contextualizing the selection, the catalogue serves as a resource for scholars and collectors interested in Wols’s contributions to modern art, particularly his work on paper, which exemplifies a transition from figurative towards more abstract and gestural idioms during the turbulent years leading up to and following World War II.