What is the mystery underlying the Architecture of our Universe? What are the laws which create the pattern of the frost which forms on our windows? What causes the stars to stay in their orbit? What . . . creates joy and sorrow within us? . . . All these are problems belonging to the world we live in and . . . should concern the artist, as well as those problems of sunlight or the growth of a tree. But art is also a world with its own laws, whether they underlie a painting of realistic or abstract forms. . . . To create new universes within these laws and to fill them with the experiences of our life is our task. . . . When they convincingly reflect the wisdom or struggle of the soul, a work of art is born.

Werner Drewes, 1936¹

Born in Germany at the turn of the century, Werner Drewes was part of the generation of artists bridging European and American modernism. In the twenties, he studied architecture in Stuttgart and Berlin before moving to Weimar and becoming a student of Johannes Itten and Paul Klee at the Bauhaus. From 1923 to 1927, Drewes traveled extensively, touring Europe and Latin America—where he had exhibitions in Argentina and Uruguay. He returned to the Bauhaus, which had moved to Dessau, and befriended and studied with Lionel Feininger and Wassily Kandinsky. In 1930, Drewes emigrated to the United States, arriving in New York during the Great Depression. Through the Works Progress Administration (WPA), he taught at the Brooklyn Museum, and he was also an art instructor at Columbia University. Although Drewes’s political sympathies lay with the downtrodden, he felt that artists should not be required to shoulder the burden of representing society’s ills. In 1936, he became a founding member of the American Abstract Artists (AAA) collective, along with Josef Albers, Ilya Bolotowsky, Burgoyne Diller, and Ibram Lassaw. At a time when figural representation dominated the American art world, the AAA was dedicated to advancing the cause of abstraction by increasing the visibility of and exhibition opportunities for abstract artists. In 1940, Drewes became the director of the New York graphic arts division of the WPA, and in 1946, he moved to St. Louis after accepting a teaching position at Washington University, where he remained until his retirement in 1965.

In his painting compositions, Drewes juxtaposing bold colors that blended geometric and biomorphic abstraction. Drewes’s 1941 painting Mirage reveals the ways that art is “a world with its own laws,” which nevertheless finds a referent in the physical world of the artist. A warm ochre field occupies most of the canvas, stopping cleanly and abruptly at the blue plane in the right third of the composition. A radiant round orb turns the ochre into a hot midday sky, reminiscent of the yellow Provençale skies of Van Gogh. Shades of yellow occupy triangles, broken trapezoids, and rectangles, pulling the viewer’s eye across the canvas. Against the hot “sky,” an oval form hovers above wavy lines painted in related shades of pink, brown, and gray—together, they suggest a head and body. Across this form, set against the blue background, is its rectangular mirror image—a mass of straight lines, clean angles, and horizontal bars of color. Is it the abstract mirage of the human form? Is the controlled environment of abstraction—a space where the artist is freed from the burden of figural representation and the laws of visual story-telling—simply a mirage? The alluring roundness of the shapes suggesting sun, head, and body contrast with the paintings other forms, which although painted in clean lines and appealing colors, remain sharp in their angularity. The dynamism of the left side of the composition, where angles and spheres compete with shifts in color and perspective for the viewer’s attention, is offset by the cool detachment implied through the color scheme and visual order of the right. Add this to the title—signifying a false image brought on by psychic or physical strain—and Drewes seems to suggest that, in a world overshadowed by unprecedented poverty and mechanized warfare, the idea of abstraction as disengaged and disinterested is itself a mirage, one fostered by artists and critics alike.