Werner Drewes
Werner Drewes was a painter, printmaker, and art teacher. Considered to be one of the founding fathers of American abstraction, he was one of the first artists to introduce concepts of the Bauhaus school within the United States. His mature style encompassed both nonobjective and figurative work and the emotional content of this work was consistently more expressive than formal. Drewes was as highly regarded for his printmaking as for his painting. In his role as teacher as well as artist he was largely responsible for bringing the Bauhaus aesthetic to America.
Early life and education
Drewes was born in 1899 to Georg Drewes, a Lutheran pastor, and Martha Schaefer Drewes. The family lived in the village of Canig within Lower Lusatia, Germany. From age eight to eighteen he attended the Saldria Gymnasium, a boarding school in Brandenburg an der Havel. There, he showed talent both for painting and woodblock printing. Graduating from Saldria in 1917, he was drafted by the German army and served in France from then until the close of the war. About this period of his life he is reported to have said that the horrors of life at the front were only made tolerable by his sketchbook, a copy of Goethe's Faust and a volume of Nietzsche.For a decade following the close of the war he studied, made paintings and prints, and traveled widely. His friend, Herwarth Walden, helped shape his appreciation for expressionist literature and art. Walden produced the quarterly magazine, Der Sturm and ran a gallery of contemporary art, Galerie Der Sturm, from which, in 1919, Drewes purchased an expressionist painting by William Wauer titled Blutrausch. In the same year he made the acquaintance of Heinrich Vogeler and participated in Vogeler's socialist utopian artists' commune, Barkenhoff, at Worpswede, Lower Saxony. In 1919 Drewes also enrolled at the Königlich Technischen Hochschule Charlottenburg to study architecture and the following year he studied the same subject at the Technischen Hochschule Stuttgart. Preferring art over architecture, he then enrolled in Stuttgart's school of applied arts where he studied life drawing and learned to work with colored glass. At this time he joined a group of artists and architects associated with the newly formed Merz Akademie, a college of design, art, and media in Stuttgart.
In 1921 his friendship with a French artist, Sébastien Laurent, led him to begin studies in Weimar at Bauhaus, then a new school that taught an integrated approach to the fine and applied arts. His instructors were Johannes Itten and Lyonel Feininger, whose paintings were expressionist and abstract, and Paul Klee, who taught bookbinding, stained glass, and murals. While at Bauhaus Drewes produced a portfolio of ten woodblock prints entitled "Ecce Homo."
In 1923 and 1924 he studied art during travels throughout Italy, Spain, the United States, and Central America and in 1926 he traveled to San Francisco, Japan, and Korea, thence taking the Trans-Siberian Railway to Manchuria, Moscow, and Warsaw. He later said the El Grecos he saw proved to be most influential in his work. While traveling, he exhibited: etchings in Madrid and Montevideo, oils and etchings in Buenos Aires and St. Louis, and etchings in San Francisco. He paid his way by the sales these exhibits produced and by taking commissions to paint portraits. While in San Francisco he set up a shop from which he sold prints he had made in Spain and South America.
After his return to Germany in 1927 he resumed study at Bauhaus, which had been forced to relocate in Dessau, Saxony-Anhalt. His instructors at that time were László Moholy-Nagy, Wassily Kandinsky, and, and Lyonel Feininger. At this time he also worked and exhibited in Frankfurt. With the rise of Nazism abstract artists found it increasingly difficult to sell their work and, in 1930, Drewes, finding the political pressure unbearable, emigrated to the United States. There, despite the world economic crisis, Drewes was able to earn a living as a professional artist.
Mature style
After Drewes moved to New York, Kandinsky, who was both friend and mentor, continued to exert a strong influence over his style. Later in life he said he had a hard time getting away from Kandinsky's influence as he developed his own style. In time he was able to bring a more emotional approach to his work and to base it, more than Kandinsky did, on natural forms.In 1930 Drewes had a solo exhibition at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library and a two-person show at the S.P.R. Penthouse Gallery. Also in that year Kandinsky introduced Drewes to Katherine Dreier, co-founder of the Society of Independent Artists and Société Anonyme. In 1931 Drewes participated in the Société Anonyme's exhibition at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and the Rand School. That year he showed prints and paintings first in a solo- and then in a two-person exhibition at the Morton Gallery and he also exhibited in group shows at the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the Brownell-Lamberton Galleries, and the Pynson Printers Galleries. These exhibitions established a pattern, as Drewes's work would be shown multiple times a year throughout the 1930s and 1940s.
From the first, Drewes's work captured the attention of the New York critics. A critic for The New York Times called attention to the subtle treatment in cityscape paintings he exhibited in the dual show with Carl Sprinchorn, noting that they "look fragile, as if they were made from reflections of the city in a soap bubble, rather than from life". In reviewing his solo show at the Morton Gallery, another Times critic praised his work as "solid". She said "though the paint is put on in much the same quick fashion", as the cityscapes at S.P.R. Penthouse, "the composition has something that keeps it from breaking as if touched". Of his solo show at the Morton Gallery Margaret Breuning, the critic for the New York Evening Post praised the "crisp vigor" of his portraits, his skill at handling the form and color of a still life, and the "well developed" and "imaginative" choice of viewpoint in a landscape. "One hopes," she wrote, "and confidently expects to see more work from this young artist". In reviewing the dual exhibition with Herbert Reynolds Kniffin, "T.C.L." of the Times called Drewes "an artist of promise" wrote of his "dynamic quality, an apparent fluency and economy of means", and said "he paints with sureness and vigor, with suggestion rather than in detail". Of this exhibition, the critic for the New York Sun wrote, "Mr. Drewes is an imaginative painter who is worth watching. He has emotions and they take hold of him and lead him at times into paintings that are highly unconventional. As a thousand forces are at work in America today trying to make all the artists conform to set patterns, this ability to withstand influences is a distinct asset."
Howard Devree of The New York Times praised the oils, watercolors, and drawings that Drewes showed in his solo exhibition at the Morton Galleries in 1933. He said the works gave the gallery "a radiantly prismatic aspect". He described some of the landscapes as heavily patterned, others as free and impressionistic and considered his drawings to be vigorous.
In 1934 Drewes began a long career as a teacher when he took a position teaching drawing and printmaking at the Brooklyn Museum Art School funded by the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration. He later said he modeled his teaching method on the one that Kandinsky used. Drewes recalled that Kandinsky was a patient and nonjudgmental teacher who would challenge his students to work out their own solutions to non-objective projects he would set and ask them to discuss the reasons behind their choices.
In 1936, the year he became an American citizen, Drewes became a founding member of both the anti-fascist American Artists' Congress and the avant-garde American Abstract Artists group. That year he also was given a ten-year retrospective exhibition at the Uptown Gallery, and participated in group shows held by Société Anonyme and the Municipal Art Committee of New York.
In 1937 he participated in the first group exhibitions of the two organizations he had helped to found: a showing of approximately 250 members of the American Artists Congress in the International Building, Rockefeller Center, and another of the 39 members of American Abstract Artists in the Squibb Galleries. Of the former, a critic singled out a painting of his as a "well deliberated" contribution to among those that were non-objective among the polemical and Social-Realist figurative works in the show. In 1937 Drewes also exhibited at the East River Gallery in an innovative program that gave potential buyers the option of renting a work while deciding whether or not to buy it. During the same eventful year a prominent architect, Wallace Harrison, helped Drewes obtain a position at the School of Architecture of Columbia University. He remained there for the next three years teaching painting, drawing, and printmaking while also making prints for the Graphic Arts Division of the WPA Federal Art Project in New York.
Drewes's 1939 exhibition at the Artists' Gallery attracted the notice of New York critics. Jerome Klein in the New York Post said "he handles the vocabulary of 'non-objective' art with the sophistication and assurance of a mature artist who is particularly adept in color relations. In fact there is hardly a spot where his harmony is off the track. And a wide gamut is run from the pale tone of 'Wintry' to the vivid contrasts of 'In the Blue Space.'" Similarly, the reviewer for Art News commented on the "breadth of scope", the "clear eloquent color", and "imaginative designs", of his work and recommended the show to "anyone who searches for meaning in abstractions".
In 1940 Drewes joined with Carl Holty to open an art school called the Department of Abstract Art at the Master Institute of United Arts. Like Drewes, Holty was a founding member of American Abstract Artists and, at the time the school opened, both men were showing works at an exhibition held by that group at the Riverside Museum. The institute and museum were both housed in a 29-story Art-Nouveau apartment building on the upper west side. While teaching at the Institute, Drewes continued as an instructor of drawing and painting at Columbia and held two other positions: director of the WPA/FAP Graphic Arts Project and map maker for the Fairchild Aerial Survey Company.
In the 1930s Fairchild Aerial Survey Company used aerial photography to make tax maps and other political maps for cities and towns. In 1940 the U.S. Army Air Corps began testing the airplanes and cameras of the company for aerial reconnaissance and the preparation wide-area survey maps.
In 1941 Howard Devree reviewed a second solo exhibition at Artists Gallery. He wrote that Drewes was a clever artist who could give a human and emotional content to abstract art thus overcoming the sterility that characterized most non-objective art. The gouache, "Grids in Space" shows the emotional content of which Devree wrote. In 1944 and 1945 Drewes worked at Stanley William Hayter's Atelier 17 in New York City. Together, they improved the intaglio technique in color print-making.