Scorpion

 

Werner Drewes

  1899 - 1985 (biography)

1946  

color woodcut 

12 1/4 x 18" image size 

pencil, lower right 

2/VI 

dated after signature; titled in lower left 

Rose: woodcuts 134 

wove Japanese 

published 

artist 

17394 

SOLD

This color woodcut was done by Drewes in 1946, while working at Washington University in St. Louis, in an edition of just 6 variant impressions. This impression has a background, while others do not. The blocks were destroyed. Werner Drewes was born in Canig, Germany, in 1899. After serving on the Western Front, Drewes attended the Bauhaus in 1921 where he studied under Paul Klee and Johannes Itten, and after extensive European travel, returned to study under Wassily Kandinsky and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. With the onset of the second World War, Drewes immigrated to New York. Despite the Depression he flourished as both artist and teacher under the Federal Art Project. In 1944 he began working at Atelier 17 in New York, exhibiting in 1945 at the Willard Gallery of thirty-five members of Atelier 17, and the MOMA exhibition of August 1944. He taught printmaking at the Brooklyn Museum, painting, drawing and printmaking at Columbia University and he lectured at Atelier 17. Drewes co-founded the American Abstract Artists group. He became a tenured professor at Washington University, retiring in 1965. Drewes continued to exhibit nationally and internationally. A major retrospective of his prints was mounted at the National Museum of American Art in 1984.