Educated by the foremost artists of the Bauhaus, Werner Drewes arrived in the United States in the early 1930s well-prepared to pass on his knowledge of art fundamentals and printmaking to students in New York and in the heartland. Introduced to the Connecticut art maven, Katherine Dreier, by his mentor Kandinsky, he had a number of exhibitions under the auspices of her Societe Anonyme. Quickly gaining many associates, he was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists, which was the first American organization to support artists pursuing this direction. An accomplished printmaker, Drewes' experimentation in woodblock and intaglio marks his place in 20th-century art history and still inspires and instructs art students today.
The son of a Lutheran minister, Drewes began studying architecture and design in Stuttgart, after serving in World War I. He continued his studies at the Bauhaus, which was based on unifying aesthetic principles and their relation to universal dynamics. Organized by the concept of a workshop, the Bauhaus encouraged individual expression of these principles, so that its members, such as Klee, Schlemmer, and Itten, had distinctive styles. The "father" of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, identified Drewes talent as a printmaker, an art which combined technical proficiency with an eye for design. Given a room for the large printing press, Drewes learned in a setting which granted equal status to this artform, which was appreciated for its direct, deep-rooted expression.
In 1923, he began a period of world travel, starting with a tour of Europe and study of the Old Masters. After getting married in Italy, he and his wife continued on to South and Central America, then the United States, Korea, Japan, Manchuria, and Russia. When he returned to Germany in 1927, he resumed his studies at the Bauhaus, now located at Dessau. Feeling an affinity with the handicraft of non-Western artists, he felt alienated from the increasing industrial advocacy of the program. In his later years, he would state that his purpose was to "search for unknown worlds," an impulse for exploration that characterizes his entire life and his life-in-art.
As many of the "outsider" artists of the Bauhaus, Drewes felt compelled to leave Hitler's Germany. Arriving in New York in 1930, he supported himself with his prints, with his woodblocks of skyscrapers considered the first such of a modern city. From 1934 to 1936, he taught drawing and printmaking at the Brooklyn Museum School (with a later stint in 1944) and then served on the Columbia University faculty from 1937 to 1940. Most notably, Drewes was granted oversight of the Graphic Arts division of the WPA in New York from 1940 to 1941.
As an artist, he moved easily from representation art to abstraction. As a Bauhaus student, he translated the world into visible form into its composites, which then became the building blocks for artistic interpretation. Drewes paid heed to the "laws of the Universe" but felt that art "has its own laws":: "To create new universes within these laws and to fill them then with the experiences of our own life is our task" When they convincingly reflect the vision or struggle of the soul, a work of art is born."
Drewes was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists, an organization which included Josef Albers, Piet Mondrian, and Ferdinand Leger among others. His own approach to abstraction included both biomorphic and geometric shapes reminiscent of Klee and Kandinsky. His grounding in printmaking brought a sharp punctuation to his bright color choices, such that that tonal juxtaposition had an on-off quality typical of woodblock. At the same time, his woodblocks incorporated a nuanced and subtle tonal range and color selection not associated with the German tradition. While a member of Stanley William Hayter's Atelier 17 in the forties, Drewes experimented with intaglio printmaking, and his interest in the technique fostered a renewed interest among American artists.
Invited by his old friend Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, Drewes went to teach at Chicago's Institute of Design in 1944. This was soon followed by appointment to the faculty at the School of Fine Arts at Washington University in St.Louis, where he became a part of a circle of artist friends that included Max Beckmann, Philip Guston, and Carl Holty. His tenure there helped secure the foundation of Bauhaus-based abstraction in this country.
Exhibited: Salons of America, 1933-34; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, 1933-34, 1944-51; Museum of Modern Art, 1939 (prize); Société Anonyme, 1930's; Museum of Costume Art, 1941 (prize); Carnegie Institute, 1945-47; St. Louis Art Museum, 1959 (prize); Cleveland Museum of Art, 1961 (solo); Legion of Honor, San Francisco, 1962 (solo); Washington University, St. Louis, 1965 (retrospective); National Museum of
American Art, 1969 (retrospective); Art Institute of Chicago; Whitney Museum of American Art.
Works Held: Addison Gallery of American Art; Art Institute of Chicago; Bennington College; Boston Museum of Fine Arts; Brooklyn Museum; Busch-Reisinger Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Fogg Museum of Art; Frankfurt Museum, Germany; Honolulu Academy of the Arts; National Museum of American Art; New York Public Library; Newark Public Library; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Phillips Memorial Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Société Anonyme; St. Louis Art Museum; Yale University Artists Guild.
Further Reading: The Second Wave: American Abstraction of the e1930's and 1940's, Susan E. Strickler and Elaine D. Gustafson, Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts, 1991.; Who Was Who in American Art 1564-1975: 400 Years of Artists in America, Vol. 1. Peter Hastings Falk, Georgia Kuchen and Veronica Roessler, eds.,Sound View Press, Madison, Connecticut, 1999. 3 Vols.
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