Werner Drewes

Werner Drewes (1899–1985) was a painter, printmaker, and art teacher.

In 1937 he participated in the first group exhibitions of the two organizations he had helped to found: a showing of approximately 250 members of the American Artists Congress in the International Building, Rockefeller Center, and another of the 39 members of American Abstract Artists in the Squibb Galleries. During the same eventful year a prominent architect, Wallace Harrison, helped Drewes obtain a position at the School of Architecture of Columbia University. He remained there for the next three years teaching painting, drawing, and printmaking while also making prints for the Graphic Arts Division of the WPA Federal Art Project in New York. While teaching at the Institute, Drewes continued as an instructor of drawing and painting at Columbia and held two other positions: director of the WPA/FAP Graphic Arts Project and map maker for the Fairchild Aerial Survey Company.

In 1941 Howard Devree reviewed a second solo exhibition at Artists Gallery. He wrote that Drewes was a clever artist who could give a human and emotional content to abstract art thus overcoming the sterility that characterized most non-objective art.

Postwar

Drewes's work continued to appear in group exhibitions throughout the years of World War II and in 1945 a solo exhibition at the Kleemann Gallery attracted unusual critical notice. Edward Alden Jewell of The New York Times observed that his work was not exclusively non-objective but included expressionist abstractions that were based on natural objects.

In 1946 he joined the faculty of the St. Louis School of Fine Arts (now the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts) at Washington University in St. Louis.