Rose III.95. Edition 20. Signed, dated, and numbered 17/20 in pencil.
Image size 11 3/8 x 8 3/4 inches (289 x 222 mm); sheet size 15 x 10 3/4 inches (381 x 273 mm).
A fine, painterly impression with rich blacks, on off-white wove Japan, with full margins (1 to 2 1/2 inches). Minor surface soiling in the margins, otherwise in good condition. Scarce.
Number 9 in a portfolio of 10 woodcuts titled It Can’t Happen Here, (Rose III 87-96), printed and published by the artist in 1934. Featured with a full-page illustration in the Drewes catalogue raisonné, p.121.
"The 10 woodcuts in the portfolio were among the earliest purely abstract compositions produced by an artist working in America. The linocut for the portfolio cover, however, makes reference to a distorted swastika. Drewes's emphatic use of an abstract idiom would have held a particular significance when the portfolio was published. In his native Germany such works were being branded as 'entartete Kunst' (Degenerate Art) by the Nazis, and Drewes's use of abstraction signified a deeper resistance to the totalitarianism engulfing Europe in the 1930s.”
—Stephen Coppel, The American Scene: Prints from Hopper to Pollock, The British Museum Press, 2008.
Collections: Brooklyn Museum of Art, Guggenheim Museum, National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Yale University Art Gallery.
