Werner Drewes' Abstractions in Print

I recently saw the work of Werner Drewes and thought, "Man, how did I never see this person's work before?" It is pretty spectacular, in range and subject. He is a master of the cut mark and composition. The Variety of his color work is soft to bold and the simplicity of a female portrait is so complex it shatters our notions of a simple, yet descriptive mark. I, for one, am riveted by his work, and I hope you will enjoy this man's oeuvre as much as I have. Be sure to share this article with anyone working in printmaking, because we need to share our fellow printmaker's work with each other.

Werner Drewes (1899–1985) was a German-American artist/teacher widely considered to be one of the founding fathers of American abstraction, and one of the first artists to introduce the ideas of the Bauhaus school to the United States.

Drewes was born in Canig, Germany. In 1917, he was drafted by the German army and served in France. After the war, he made art and traveled Europe. He studied architecture at both the Königlich Technischen Hochschule Charlottenburg and at the Technischen Hochschule Stuttgartand. He then enrolled in Stuttgart's school of applied arts (Kunstgewerbeschule) and joined a group of artists and architects associated with the newly formed Merz Akademie, a college of design, art, and media in Stuttgart. He also studied at the Bauhaus, with teachers Johannes Itten, Lyonel Feininger, and Paul Klee.

In 1923 and 1924 he studied art during travels throughout Italy, Spain, the United States, and Central America and in 1926 he traveled to San Francisco, Japan, and Korea, Manchuria, Moscow, and Warsaw. He resumed study at Bauhaus in 1927, in Dessau. He studied with László Moholy-Nagy, Wassily Kandinsky, and Lyonel Feininger. With the rise of Nazism, Drewes emigrated to the United States in 1930. His work soon captured the attention of the New York critics.

Drewes began to teach at the Brooklyn Museum Art School funded by the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration. In 1936, he became an American citizen and a founding member of both the anti-fascist American Artists' Congress and the avant-garde American Abstract Artists group. Healso participated in group shows held by Société Anonyme at Black Mountain College, in North Carolina. The next year, Drewes obtained a position at the School of Architecture of Columbia University. During this time, he made prints for the Graphic Arts Division of the WPA Federal Art Project in New York.

In 1940 he opened an art school called the Department of Abstract Art at the Master Institute of United Arts. In 1944 and 1945 he worked at Stanley William Hayter's Atelier 17 in New York City. Together, they improved the intaglio technique in color print-making.

In 1945 Drewes taught at Brooklyn College and then shifted to Chicago where he joined with Moholy-Nagy to teach at the Institute of Design. In 1946 he joined the faculty of the School of Fine Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. He retired in 1965 and moved to Reston, Virginia.

As a prolific printmaker, Drewes produced some 732 prints, including 269 etchings and drypoints, 30 lithographs, 14 celloprints, a lone silkscreen, and 418 woodcuts. His mature style encompassed nonobjective and figurative work and the emotional content was consistently expressive. Enjoy, my inked up brethren!

Anwar Jalal Shemza: A Modernist's Depiction of Islam

 Anwar Jalal Shemza (1928 - 1985) An artist and writer, Shemza was born into an Indian Kashmiri family of carpet makers. He went to school in Lahore, and eventually opened his own commercial art studio in 1947, also in Lahore. He was a leading member of a modernist group called the Lahore Art Circle, and he quickly became a leading figure in Pakistan's cultural life.

He went to England to study art at the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art in London. In 1960, he received a scholarship from the British Council to study printmaking. While he was in Britain, he met and married English artist Mary Katrina, and they had two daughters. Shemza and his wife traveled to Pakistan for several times, but they later settled in Stafford, England, where he taught art and design at area high schools.

Shemza was initially influenced by Modernism most notably Paul Klee although later works also showed a traditional Islamic influence. During the 60s, Shemza incorporated Islamic themes into his work, like using aspects of the prophet Mohammed’s name, imaginary plants and roots derived from Arabic script, and illegible patterns of Arabic letters. Shemza drew inspiration from the strong linear lines in Arabic and Persian calligraphy because he liked their structure, which is geometric yet the forms remain fluid and rhythmic. This blend of calligraphic curves and linear pattern, were suggestive,  to him, of Islamic architectural facades or elaborate patterned designs of Eastern carpets and textiles.

There is something archetypal in Shemza's work, for certain, but there also some loose, mathematical interpretation going on as well. Something about the geometry within the less than precisely geometric shaped sections hints at or unveils a layer of understanding for one's position within their environment. You might think I'm stretching that a bit, but i do sense Shemza's Islamic interests and the emotion behind the formal elements, which is this case is geometry, nature and script. Some of Shemza's images have forms that remind me of abstracted chess pieces, and for all intents and purposes, the practice of chess is a study of rules, positions, and learning to bend those rules to find one's creativity through the structure, I sense something similar happening here, where the study of architecture, having its own set of rules, is a basis for the artist's reinterpretation of formal structure. There is the reference to Klee's playfulness, but Shemza is more focused in his subject's source material. I like his looser hand-drawn craggy lines, and wish I could see more. Alas, there is little in the western archives of this artist's oeuvre. It's another classic case of the accessibility divide between the east and west. Hopefully, Shemza's work will continue to gain recognition.  

Solo exhibitions of Shemza's work were held England, India, Pakistan, and Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. His other accomplishments included being the editor of Ehsas, a magazine on art and architecture. He published seven novels in Urdu as well as poetry. Radio Pakistan often broadcast his plays. 

Selected Exhibitions: 

6th Triennial of World Art, New Delhi, in 1956 

Pakistan National Council of the Arts, Karachi, Rawalpindi and Lahore, in 1960-2;

5th Exhibition of International Prints, Moderna Galerija, Ljubiana, in 1963 

Graphische Sammlung, Vienna, in 1963 

Gulbenkian Museum of Oriental Art, Durham, in 1963

Treasures from the Commonwealth at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 1965 

6th International Print Biennial, Tokyo, in 1968

Commonwealth Institute, Edinburgh, in 1969 

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, in 1972

1st British International Drawing Biennial, Teeside Art Gallery, in 1973 ( Major Prize recipient) 

Indus Gallery, Karachi, in 1985

the Other Story at Hayward Gallery, London, in 1989-90 

Printmakers of Pakistan at Bradford City Art Gallery & Museum, in 1997-98

Indus Gallery, Karachi, in 1985

Manchester Metropolitan University, in 1992

Birmingham City Museum, in 1997-8

Typo at Ikon, Birmingham, 1999-2000 

Pakistan Another Vision at the Centre of Contemporary Art, Glasgow, in 2000 

The Prints of Dada's Co-Founder, Marcel Janco

Marcel Janco (Iancu) (1895-1984) a Romanian and Israeli artist, was the co-founder of Dadaism and a leading advocate of Constructivism. Janco was the eldest of four children, born in Bucharest to a wealthy Jewish family. He attended Gheorghe Şincai School and studied drawing with Iosef Isor. At Gheoghe Lazar High School, Janco met and became friends a number of soon to be influential people like Tzara, Vinea, Jacques C. Costin. Janco’s friends and collaborators often described him as melancholy, very handsome and charismatic. He was considered one of the leading Romanian Jewish intellectuals of his generation, very knowledgeable and was well-read in French literature. 

            

In October 1912, Marcel worked as Editor and Graphic Designer for the Symbolist magazine Simbolul, but he later moved on to work for a daily paper called Seara.  After the start of WWI, Marcel left Bucharest for Switzerland where he studied Chemistry at the  University of Zurich, then switched to Architecture and studied at the Federal Institute of Technology.  He and his brother Jules earned their living as cabaret performers; where Marcel played the accordion. It was here that they met Hugo Ball  in Cabaret Voltaire. Marcel was personally involved with the acts and performances at  Cabaret Voltaire which attracted people to their performances like the notable theorist Vladimir Lenin and psychiatrist Carl Jung. The Voltaire group later called themselves Dadaists. Janco illustrated the their advertisements, and his prints were used as to illustrate their almanacs, but conflicts with his friend Tzara lead him and Hans Arp to leave the Dadaists and they joined  a number of art Constructivist groups like Neue Kunst,  Das Neue Leben  and Artistes Radicaux.

It was also in December 1919, after Marcel went to France, that he met and married Amélie Micheline "Lily" Ackermann. Two years later, the Jancos moved to Romania, where they had one daughter, but another daughter died in infancy. The Jancos divorced  in 1930, and Marcel later remarried, this time to Clara "Medi" Goldschlager, the sister of Jacques G. Costin. The couple had one child, Deborah Theodora. 

The next few years saw Janco widely involved in architecture, and editing and illustrating for several journals and exhibiting his art. Janco opened up his own business, Birou de Studii Moderne, officially run by the fictitious Marcel Iuliu Iancu, and it was at this time that Janco had a "revolutionary" vision to change the face of urban design. Early in 1922, Janco and Vinea founded the historically important and longest-running Romanian avant-garde political/art magazine, called Contimporanul to which Janco contributed some 60 illustrations, 40 articles on art and architecture, and included a number of his architectural designs. Janco was also largely responsible for the magazine’s feature issue on Surrealism. He maintained a link between 

Contimporanul and Der Sturm, which republished his drawings, and the Vienna-based magazine MA also published samples of his graphics. Janco, with M.H. Maxy,   curated the Contimporanul International Art Exhibit of 1924, which reunited the major currents of Europe's modern art. It included works by Constantin Brancusi  Hans Arp, Klee, Richter, and Kurt Schwitters.  Janco also illustrated Pillat and Perpessisius’s Antologia poeţilor de azi, and produced drawings for Camil Baltzar's erotic Strigări trupeşti lîngă glezne. Around 1926, he joined with the Bucharest art collective Criterion, which exhibited at Dalles Hall in 1933, and he represented the Bucharest collective Arta Nouă, exhibiting at the Maison d'Art club.  He took on students in his Bucharest studio, including the future painter-photographer Hedde Sterne, Once Janco finally received his architect certification in 1934,  he wrote a text about the need and opportunity in Bucharest for modernist urban planning, called Urbanism, nu romantism. In 1935, Janco published Către o arhitectură a Bucureştilor, which recommended a "utopian" project to solve the city's social crisis. 

During the late 1930s Janco’s family and other Romanian Jews began to see and experience a wave anti-Semitism with the rise of Hitler and his followers. When the anti-semitic National Christian Party took power, Janco was coming to terms with the Zionist ideology, describing Israel as the "cradle" and "salvation" of Jews. In 1941, Marcel and his family left Romania and relocated to Israel. Once they were settled, he worked as an architect for the city of Tel Aviv, and he designed and helped to preserve Israel’s national parks. 

While in Israel, Janco became a noted participant in the development of local Jewish art, and he lectured at the Seminar Hakibbutzim college.   In May 1953, when he came across a deserted Palestinian Arab village, Ein Hod, Janco felt that the place should not be demolished, but rebuilt as an artist colony.  He became the colony’s first mayor and instituted a strict code for its settlement. The Ein Hod colony was also important in that the architecture cultivated pre-existing Arab-style masonry instead of building new buildings. Janco was also a founding member of Ofakim Hadashim. Also, during this period, Janco exhibited his artwork widely throughout Europe and had a retrospective of his art in New York City, in 1950.

Janco's studio in Ein Hod, IsraelJanco made concerted efforts to preserve connections with Romania, and his Ein Hod studio became home to other Romanian Jewish emigrants fleeing communism. As for Janco’s buildings, the Romanian communist regime largely ignored his architectural contributions, and after the Romanian Revolution of 1989, Janco's buildings were subject to legal battles. Only three of his buildings (as of 2008) are listed in the National Register of Monuments.

Janco’s artistic influences spanned Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, German Expressionism,  Dada, Constructivism, and Surrealism. A lot of his prints were linocuts and silkscreens. His covers and illustrations for Simbolui are generally considered Art Nouveau and  Symbolist, but his own artistic preferences were closer to Cezanne and Cubism. Janco himself claimed that Dada was not as much a fully-fledged new artistic style as "a force coming from the physical instincts", directed against "everything cheap". His own work featured Dada found art, and supposedly he was the first Dadaist to experiment with everyday objects rearranged as art. He credited Paul Klee with having helped him "interpret the soul of primitive man". Around 1919, Janco had come to agree with Schwitters and van Doesburg to describe Constructivism as a needed transition from "negative" Dada. Futurism was of interest after Janco’s 1930 encounter with Marinetti.  Another major influence on Janco's work was Expressionism, via Die Brucke and  Kokoshcke, and later reactivated by his work with Der Sturm. After 1930, Janco returned to "analytic" Cubism. In discussing architecture, Janco first theorized that Abstract-Expressionistic decorations needed to an integral part of the basic architectural design. He said his own architectural work was entirely dedicated to functionalism, which included his furniture designs. By the time of World War II, he returned to Expressionism and then moved into the realm of pure abstraction, which he believed represented the artistic "language" of a new age. Soon after moving to Israel, Janco began painting brightly colored landscapes, and later he developed an interest in the Jewish tradition of interpreting symbols. Finally, Janco saw his Ein Hod project as the culmination of his work, and called it "my last Dada activity". 

Janco in Ein Hod in the 1950s

Awards:

Some of his works represented Romania at New York City’s “Futurist” show,1936

Dizengoff Prize, 1945, 1946, 1950, 1951

One of three artists displayed at first Israeli pavilion at Venice Biennale, 1952

Israel Prize, 1967

"Worthy of Tel Aviv" distinction, 1982

The Bucharest Art Museum (MNAR) organized a centennial Marcel Janco exhibition

The Cotroceni Palace featured Janco’s work in the "Jewish Art of Romania" retrospective, 2000