Christine Mehring, graduate student and curator of Wols exhibit. Photo by Rose Lincoln.

What if Jackson Pollock had been a photographer before turning to painting, producing a substantial body of work that only came to light after his death?

One can imagine the excitement in the art world following such a revelation, the eagerly awaited gallery opening, the attempts by critics to find a relationship between the photographs and the distinctive gestural paintings for which the artist is best known.

In the case of Pollock, this scenario remains hypothetical. No photographic oeuvre by the abstract expressionist painter exists, as far as we know. But the artist who has been called the Jackson Pollock of Europe did start his career as a photographer, and his work can now be seen at Harvard's Busch-Reisinger Museum through April 25.

Wolfgang Otto Schulze (1913-1951), who called himself Wols, is known as the founding father of a school of painting called Informel, meaning formless or shapeless. Beginning around 1945 until his death six years later from eating contaminated horse meat, Wols produced a series of abstract canvases characterized by thickly textured applications of paint into which he often scratched designs. Critics interpreted his work as an embodiment of existentialist ideas, and Jean-Paul Sartre wrote an admiring essay for Wols' first major catalog in 1963.

But the esteem that Wols enjoyed in Europe had no counterpart on this side of the Atlantic, a fact that German-born Christine Mehring, a graduate student in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the curator of the exhibition, finds curious.

"I was struck by the discrepancy between his reputation in Europe and the United States. He's a renowned figure there, but here nobody knows him," she said.

Regarding the paintings, however, Mehring does not share the high opinion of Wols' European admirers. She finds them to be less original and less challenging than those of Pollock and other American abstract expressionists. To her it is the photographs that are in a class by themselves.

"I think their value is the way they present the everyday in a way that is strange and unfamiliar. They 'defamiliarize' things that we're used to seeing in the world around us, which is something that much art does."

Nowhere is this process of defamiliarization more apparent than in the remarkable series of still life photographs Wols took in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Poor, isolated, sometimes reduced to using borrowed equipment, he turned his camera on the food items his wife brought back from the market.

An example of Wols' work: Le Pavilion de L'Elegance (Mannequins row 136), 1937. Photo courtesy of the University Art Museums.

Mushrooms, onions, sliced tomatoes, a can of sardines, a skinned rabbit ‹ in Wols' moody and dramatically lit photographs these humble, sometimes repulsive, objects seem to take on a life of their own, becoming not only odd but a little frightening as well. Some of the objects cannot even be identified with any assurance. Are those sausages, or worms struggling to crawl off the plate? Is that cheese rolled in bacon, cannoli, or a trio of maggots?

"In some photographs you get a sense that the objects are growing and decaying at the same time. In other cases they seem to be communicating together in their own world," Mehring said.

Mehring sees Wols' retreat into the kitchen (which served as an improvised darkroom as well) as symptomatic of the uncertainty permeating Paris in the late 1930s, a time of conflicting treaties and the threat of imminent war. She finds in these portraits of enigmatic onions and sinister sausages the same insecurity and alienation from the everyday world that Sartre writes about in his 1938 novel Nausea.

But Wols' photographic vision was not always this restricted. He came to Paris in 1932 at the age of 19, after unsuccessfully trying to study with the avant garde artist and photographer László Moholy-Nagy in Berlin. His early Paris photographs are largely street scenes. Some include figures, while others simply show a section of pavement, cobblestones, a mud puddle, torn posters on a wall.

Meanwhile, Wols supported himself through portrait photography. One wonders how pleased his clients were with his unconventional approach. The lawyer, Maître Drugeon, stares blindly from his photograph, his eyes completely hidden by glaring reflections on the lenses of his glasses. Nicole Bouban seems asleep or in a trance, the butterfly embroidered on the fabric behind her head seemingly part of her dream.

Wols photographed himself as well, but the images he produced frustrate the viewer's desire to see what the artist was really like. In one photograph his face is in almost total shadow. A few highlights indicate the outline of his eyes and nose. A series of six self-portraits show the prematurely balding Wols assuming six different facial expressions, ranging from somnolent indifference to an affable smile. Again, we look in vain for the "real" Wols.

In 1937, Wols became the official photographer of the Pavillon de l'Elégance at the Paris World's Fair, his only major professional commission. Surrealism was all the rage in Paris that year, and Wols' harshly lit photographs of mannequins draped in the latest fashions fit well with the ideas of the graphic designers who used them in their layouts.

When the war came, Wols' position became increasingly insecure. As a German in occupied France, officially classified as a draft-dodger, he was subject to arrest and was forced to live as a fugitive. The authorities finally arrested him and confiscated his photographic equipment, and he spent more than a year (1939- 1940) in a prison camp.

When Mehring decided to present the work of this little-known artist to an American audience, she realized that the task was a daunting one.

"When you introduce an artist to a new country, it's a terrible responsibility. How can 20 or 30 photographs do justice to an entire oeuvre?"

Mehring's confidence grew as she scoured collections in Europe and America for examples of Wols' work and became more familiar with the material. Along the way she received help and advice from the artist's sister and benefitted from a study visit at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, which possesses a large collection of Wols' photographs.

Putting together the exhibition taught Mehring a great deal about subjects that had been outside the province of her art history studies ‹ things like crating art works for shipping, getting them through customs, and tracking down the reproduction rights for various items.

Mehring is one of a handful of graduate students who have been given the opportunity to curate an exhibition at Harvard, but it is a trend that is growing. Mehring credits the Department and the Harvard University Art Museums for their openness to student curators.

"In most art history programs, people are historically trained, but they're not trained to deal with objects. Our Department is very much trying to correct that, to make the study of objects part of our training. And few museums would allow a graduate student to organize a full-scale exhibition as the Harvard University Art Museums do."

Mehring is now contemplating a career in museum work as an alternative or in addition to teaching.