Indian Motif

 

Werner Drewes

  1899 - 1985 (biography)

1943 /44 

woodcut 

11 3/4 x 15" image size 

pencil, lower right 

5/XX 

inscribed in pencil in lower left: "5/XX"; dated 1943 after the signature; inscribed "125" in the lower center margin; pencil titled along the lower sheet edge 

Rose 113 

ivory, fibrous laid Japanese 

published 

artist 

MCT209 

$2,200.00 

German-born artist Werner Drewes studied both at the Bauhaus 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 was part of an eight image series of abstracted woodcuts Drewes did between 1943 and 1944. Drewes referred to Native American symbols for his woodcut "Indian Motifs". He printed this impression, in black, in an edition of 20. He printed a second state in black and green, also in an edition of 20. He then printed a number of proofs that he colored with yellow, orange, ocher, and gray, using a brush on the woodblock. These vary in colors. The blocks were destroyed.