Werner Drewes

Werner Drewes (1899-1985) lived a life that was like a metronome, always in beat with the tumultuous and transitional times of the twentieth century. The wanderlust painter was born at the turn of the century in Canig, Germany. His father, a Lutheran minister, was always questioning the nature of life and reality, and this searching sensibility later played an impacting role in Drewes's perspective and artistic career. Questions of this kind are reflected in his own writing when he stated: "But art is also a world with its own laws, whether they underlie a painting of realistic or abstract forms. To create new universes within these laws and to fill them with experiences of our life is our task. When they convincingly reflect the wisdom or struggle of the soul, a work of art is born."

Drewes began his artistic career after his military duties in the First World War, when he was twenty-two years old. During this period he studied with prominent figures such as Wassily Kandinsky, Johannes Itten, and Paul Klee. While attending the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany, Drewes became close friends with Lyonel Feininger, László Moholy-Nagy, and Josef Albers, connections that would later prove decisive for his career. During the Bauhaus's Weimar years, there was a strong emphasis on avant-garde experimentation, and Drewes was torn between the worlds of representational structure and abstract organization. This struggle remained prominent in his mind and is reflected in the stylistic fluctuation between representational and geometric abstraction that runs through his mature work.

In 1923, Drewes left the Bauhaus and traveled through Europe, South and Central America, and Asia. Perhaps this was in part an attempt to escape the turmoil that was already bubbling to the surface in Europe. After his world-traveling adventure, Werner later returned to the Bauhaus to find the educational regimen had changed, and with distaste for this new structure he eventually relocated to New York, where he became one of the key figures in the transmission of European modernism to a new American audience.

As a professor at the Brooklyn Museum School and Columbia University, Werner Drewes encouraged and inspired many future generations of artists. In 1937 he joined a group of well-known artists to found the American Abstract Artists, an organization that played a decisive role in establishing abstract art as a serious force in American culture. During this period his style of painting became highly distinguishable, and he concentrated on abstract geometric landscapes and architectural abstraction. He received an award in 1939 from the Museum of Modern Art during an exhibition there. In the 1940s Drewes taught at the Moholy-Nagy Institute of Design in Chicago. A year later he relocated to St. Louis, Missouri, and would remain teaching at the School of Fine Art at Washington University for more than twenty years.

Drewes's woodcuts and abstract prints are among the most important American graphic works of the mid-twentieth century, and he was elected to the National Academy of Design. His paintings and prints are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Metropolitan, and other leading American museums, where they remain vital documents of the transatlantic modernist tradition.