Untitled,

1926

Drewes and Moholy-Nagy were among the many artists who fled Germany in the wake of the Nazi rise to power. In the late 1920s, Drewes had studied under Moholy-Nagy and Wassily Kandinsky at the modernist Bauhaus art school in Dessau, closed by the Nazis in 1932. In 1930, he moved to the United States and became an early proponent of abstraction and Bauhaus design principles, eventually teaching alongside the artist Max Beckmann at Washington University in St. Louis.

To create his photograms, Moholy-Nagy placed objects onto or above light-sensitive paper. In a process he described as “painting with light,” the artist exposed the paper to light, registering the direct encounter of an object and its shadow without the use of a camera. While Moholy-Nagy stretched photography’s associations with verisimilitude and technology to find expressive and emotive potential, Drewes exploited the effects of the woodcut. In the work seen here, he made rough, quick cuts in the wood and accentuated the woodgrain to give his self-portrait an atmosphere of psychological interiority.