Composition VIII — The Two Fighters, from the portfolio It Can’t Happen Here: 10 Blockprints by Drewes

Artwork Description

When Nazi Germany began curtailing its citizens' civil rights in the 1930s, Werner Drewes joined many artists, scientists, and educators who immigrated to safer nations. After settling in the United States, he became a leading painter and printmaker by introducing American modernists to the bold new trends he had learned in Germany's esteemed Bauhaus design school. For example, his series of ten woodcut prints titled It Can't Happen Here celebrated freedom of expression with abstract images that would have been deemed unpatriotic and "degenerate" by the fascists in his homeland. Several of these works, including Composition VIII, use sharp diagonal lines and overlapping black-and-white shapes to portray a war between opposing figures and forces, visually alluding to the polarization and violence he had recently fled. The series title may also have been a warning about what he perceived as growing racism, nationalism, and xenophobia in the United states. The following year, Nobel Prize--winning writer Sinclair Lewis used the title It Can't Happen Here for a dystopian novel in which America becomes a dictatorship.