Willy Wolff

Moritz Martin Willy Wolff completed an apprenticeship as cabinet-maker and a period as journeyman, working and travelling through northern Germany, before commencing his studies, initially at the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule Dresden, and then from 1927 through 1933 at the Kunstakademie in Dresden. From 1930 on, he was a masters fellow of Otto Dix. Following the Machtergreifung of the National Socialists in 1933, Otto Dix was dismissed from his post and Willy Wolff left the Dresdner Kunstakademie with his teacher. Wolff had been a member of the German Communist Party (KPD) since 1929. He worked in the Rote Hilfe (an organization lending legal and other aid to left-wing political prisoners) and in 1930 became a member of the Assoziation revolutionärer bildender Künstler (Association of Revolutionary Artists). The greater part of his artistic oeuvre was destroyed in the heavy bombing of Dresden on 13 February 1945. All his work from the period in which he studied with Otto Dix was lost. After the war, therefore, Wolff had to start over again from scratch as an artist.

In 1946, Wolff co-founded the Dresden artists’ community Das Ufer. From about 1950 through the mid-1960s, his principal interest shifted from painting to drawing. In 1956, Wolff married the painter Annemarie Koehler-Balden, who had just returned from emigration to England and who exerted an important influence on the development of his work. Voyages to London and Derby in middle England, in 1957 and 1958, gave Wolff his first exposure to Pop-Art, which had sprouted there and in the USA. In the course of the 1960s, Wolff made a gradual transition toward abstraction in his work and, after ca. 1967, found his own voice within the Pop-Art movement. It proved difficult for him to exhibit these works — a solo exhibition planned for 1968 was prohibited by the authorities on the day of its opening. Nevertheless, the staff of his gallery Kunst der Zeit in Dresden managed to keep the show open to visitors for three days. Wolff suffered from the lack of recognition for his work. It was not until the 1970s that he was able to exhibit again on a large scale in official venues.

As assistant to the management of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen in Dresden, the Historisches Museum, and the Grünes Gewölbe, Wolff was employed part-time through 1970 and worked independently as an artist during his off-hours. For health reasons, Wolff stopped painting in 1970 and began to experiment with monotypes, collages, assemblages and objects. The Albertina in Vienna acquired a series of drawings and monotypes from him in the 1970s. In 1971, Dresden’s Galerie Neue Meister purchased Willy Wolff’s painting Das Liebespaar (The Lovers) from 1932. His first big solo exhibition—in Dresden—did not take place until 1976.

text: Elke Neumann, translation: Darrell Wilkins