Werner Drewes On Sale

Werner Drewes was a painter, printmaker, and teacher, who was born in Canig, Germany, in 1899. His father, a Lutheran Minister, hoped he would become an architect, but Werner chose the life of an artist. After he served on the front line in France during the war, Werner was admitted to the Bauhaus in 1921, where he studied under Klee, Itten, and Muche. Later, he traveled through Europe to study such old masters as Tintoretto, Velasquez and El Greco. After marrying Margaret Schrobsdorff, they traveled throughout South America, North America and Asia. In 1930, Werner immigrated to New York City with his family. In New York City, despite the Depression, Werner joined other Bauhaus artists such as Piet Mondrian and Lyonel Feininger to make a living as an artist. This group became the core of the American Abstract Artists group. Werner taught at Columbia University, worked on the design of the 1939 World's Fair building, and had shows at the Museum of Modern Art, Kleeman Gallery, and elsewhere. In 1946, he accepted a tenured position at the Washington University in St. Louis. In his later years, he moved to Virginia and continued to show at galleries in Germany, Turkey, and in the United States. The Smithsonian held a show attributing his 65 years as a printmaker at the Museum for American Artists.

Beginning in the early 20th century, abstract art became a leading style of modernism. Rather than portray the world in a way that represented reality, as had been the dominating style of Western art in the previous centuries, abstract paintings, prints and sculptures are marked by a shift to geometric forms, gestural shapes and experimentation with color to express ideas, subject matter and scenes.

Although abstract art flourished in the early 1900s, propelled by movements like Fauvism and Cubism, it was rooted in the 19th century. In the 1840s, J.M.W. Turner emphasized light and motion for atmospheric paintings in which concrete details were blurred, and Paul Cézanne challenged traditional expectations of perspective in the 1890s.

Some of the earliest abstract artists — Wassily Kandinsky and Hilma af Klint — expanded on these breakthroughs while using vivid colors and forms to channel spiritual concepts. Painter Piet Mondrian, a Dutch pioneer of the art movement, explored geometric abstraction partly owing to his belief in Theosophy, which is grounded in a search for higher spiritual truths and embraces philosophers of the Renaissance period and medieval mystics. Black Square, a daringly simple 1913 work by Russian artist Kazimir Malevich, was a watershed statement on creating art that was free “from the dead weight of the real world,” as he later wrote.

Surrealism in the 1920s, led by artists such as Salvador Dalí, Meret Oppenheim and others, saw painters creating abstract pieces in order to connect to the subconscious. When Abstract Expressionism emerged in New York during the mid-20th century, it similarly centered on the process of creation, in which Helen Frankenthaler’s expressive “soak-stain” technique, Jackson Pollock’s drips of paint, and Mark Rothko’s planes of color were a radical new type of abstraction.

Conceptual art, Pop art, Hard-Edge painting and many other movements offered fresh approaches to abstraction that continued into the 21st century, with major contemporary artists now exploring it, including Anish Kapoor, Mark Bradford, El Anatsui and Julie Mehretu.

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