35. Werner Drewes
(1899-1985)

Rotterdam (Industrial Harbor)

(click on image to print)
Drewes: Rotterdam

Rotterdam (Industrial Harbor)

Woodcut in colors, 1957, 285 x 557 mm., Rose 188. A fine, strong impression in black, red and mauve with the white of the paper used as in a chiaroscuro, on japan paper with full, large margins, titled signed and dated in pencil and numbered from the edition of 30. Drewes was born in Eastern Germany, the son of a Lutheran minister, and served in the German army in World War I. He first studied architecture and then, at the Bauhaus, art under Klee and Itten, traveled the world for several years and was again at the Bauhaus in 1927, under Kandinsky for painting and Moholy-Nagy for graphics. It was the Bauhaus aesthetic, which was something new to America, that he brought with him when he immigrated in 1930, teaching at, among other places, the Brooklyn Museum, Columbia University and Washington University of St. Louis. Drewes began as an Expressionist artist and became more and more abstractionist as he matured. The very effective image here is a structured abstraction of nautical and industrial forms, in a realistic relationship to one another, but in no way a realistic view.