Getty Museum

[Grapefruit]

Date

1938–1939

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Culture

French

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

>At Cassis, the pebbles, fish,/ rocks under a magnifying glass/ the salt of the sea and the sky/ 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/ ? Nothing is explicable/ we only know appearances. The above excerpt from a poem written by Wols in 1944 readily applies to this simple "portrait" of a slightly rotten citrus fruit. Deriving his subject matter from the everyday objects around him, Wols placed the fruit in the center of the image, its darkened, bruised sides in the shadows. The fruit becomes a metaphor for a psychological state, at once clear and open but also containing the threat of encroaching darkness. Wols himself often struggled with despair over the world around him, so the image could be understood as a kind of self-portrait. The crenulated edges of the print indicate that a commercial photofinisher, rather than Wols, made the print.

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