Rose III.93. Edition 20, a proof impression apart from the published edition. Signed, dated, and titled Abstraction No. 7 in pencil.
Image size 9 1/2 x 12 1/2 inches (241 x 318 mm); sheet size 13 x 18 1/4 inches (330 x 464mm).
A fine, painterly impression with the background in, on off-white wove Japan, with full margins (1 1/8 to 3 1/8 inches). Minor surface soiling in the margins, otherwise in excellent condition. A very scarce, possibly unique proof impression, with the upper background in variegated black (the final state was solid black) and with the working title Abstraction No. 7 in the artist's hand.
Number 7 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.119.
Literature: American Master Prints from the Betty and Douglas Duffy Collection, The Trust for Museum Exhibitions, Washington, D.C., 1987.
"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: Bauhaus Archive Museum of Design (Berlin), Brooklyn Museum of Art, Guggenheim Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Yale University Art Gallery.
