Werner Drewes
American, born Germany, 1899 - 1985Reflections, 1958
Not on view
Woodcut on paper
Dimensions19 5/8 × 24 1/16 in.
Image: 11 3/16 × 20 7/8 in.
Gift of Mr. Jack B. Pierson in memory of Mr. Robert Martin Purcell, 1983.26
Werner Drewes was born in Germany in 1899, and was a student of architecture and design at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau. In 1923, he left Germany for Italy and Spain to study the Old Masters such as El Greco and Velasquez. He moved to the United States in 1930 and became a citizen in 1936. Over his lifetime, Drewes taught drawing at Columbia University, Brooklyn College, and Washington University in St. Louis.
Drewes’s work is dominated by strong white and black contrasts. He was a practitioner of a printmaking technique known as woodcut where the design is drawn on the sanded surface of a wooden board and then deeply undercut. This technique creates incised lines, strong blacks, and sharp contrast, for which Drewes is well known.
