Title: Woman reading at a table
Medium: Oil on canvas
Signed and dated 1947
Unframed: 89cm x 69cm
Framed: 120cm x 100cm
Before Welz immigrated to South Africa in 1937 he lived and worked as an architect in Paris for 12 years. During this time, he frequently visited the art museums and galleries where he became familiar with the work of Paul Cezanne, Pablo Picasso, and the Impressionists.
In his studies of nude figures, still lives and portraits painted during the 1940s Welz emphasised the physical presence of his subjects. An art critic that wrote for the Brussels newspaper, De Standaard, beautifully explained his work as being “neo-realistic because he understood how to avoid simply repeating the lessons taught by the Impressionists and Constructivist, but instead consolidated what he had learned from these artists” (Miles 1997:8).
