New Rochelle - With the Wind

Werner Drewes

Werner Drewes arrived in the United States permanently in 1931, emigrating from his native Germany, where he had studied at the Bauhas. He brought with him a Modernist visual language he had developed at the Bauhaus which was evolving toward abstraction.

In the summer of 1931 he did a series of eight images, five drypoints and three etchings of a yacht race in New Rochelle, New York, this image being the third in the series. The line of this composition is active and minimal, capturing the force of the wind. He used roulette to add subtle shading. He printed a small edition of twenty impressions which were signed and dated by Drewes. The plate was later destroyed.

The New New Rochelle Yacht Club was founded in 1885 and sponsered numerous regattas. This race was in 1931, the 46th Annual 10 Meter Class race at Harrison Island. Drewes attended this race and recorded his impressions on copper.

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."