Untitled (kinetic shapes) - from American Abstract Artists 1937 portfolio

Werner Drewes

German-born artist Werner Drewes studied both at the Bauhaus (founded over 100 years ago) with Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. After immigrating to the United States he worked in the WPA and, helped found the American Abstract Artists group and, in 1944, studied printmaking with Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17 in New York.

"This portfolio [consisted] of original lithographs by 30 founding members of American Abstract Artists. Vaclav Vytlacil worked as technical advisor to the AAA members. The portfolio of 31 zinc plate lithographs [included] the frontispiece. There is also a numbered artist list. 32 pieces, 12 x 9 1/4 inches, printed by Cane Press in New York City. The edition was printed instead a catalogue for the first American Abstract Artists exhibition at the Squibb Galleries. The artwork was intended to supplement the exhibition rather than document it. 500 copies were printed and sold for 50 cents at the Squibb Galleries. Not many are known to be in existence. All the prints are Untitled."

Source: AbstractAmericanArtists.org

As a printmaker, Bauhaus trained Werner Drewes worked using intaglio, lithography and relief methods using both black and white to brilliant color and his work ran the gamut from figurative to non-objective. He was able to interweave these throughout his career, as Peter Hahn stated in the catalogue raisonné of Drewes' work by Ingrid Rose:

"Regardless of the technique, whether woodcut, etching, aquatint, engraving or lithography, the basis for the images is technical expertise, indeed mastery. A surprisingly rich body of work exists between expression and abstraction, between construction and realism, a field of tension combining very different means of expression, in the center of which the human being is always apparent. It is an independent body of work which, based on the acquired technical and academic teaching of the Bauhaus."