Thomas Herbig: Heinrich Dreber. The draughtsman

Description

Eighty years after Richard Schöne, Thomas Herbig devotes himself for the first time in a major monograph to the artist Heinrich Dreber as a draughtsman and, informed by an extensive study of sources, introduces us to this artistic cosmos, which more than deserves to be highlighted from the circle of specialists and presented to a wider audience.

"I don't think I'm mistaken when I assume that in our time more of what is important and thoughtful is written down in hand drawings than in pictures."

This remark was written by the painter Moritz von Schwind, a contemporary of Heinrich Dreber, to the famous Hamburg collector Arnold Otto Meyer, and it could not be more aptly directed at Dreber. Hardly any other artist of his time devoted himself so intensively to drawing, leaving behind such a diversified oeuvre in terms of both content and style. It is therefore all the more astonishing that since Richard Schöne's extensive monograph from 1940, no one has dealt with the artist in depth.

As Ludwig Richter's highly esteemed pupil, Dreber created fascinatingly fine drawings in the 1840s in the style of the great German Renaissance art of drawing, before setting off for Italy and moving further and further away from his roots. In the 1850s, the coarse-grained abrasion of the pencil dominates, which is less line and more surface; a development that almost reaches the point of dissolving the subject of the picture. In this he is close to Arnold Böcklin, his artist friend from his Roman days, and discovers a mythology through the line that reveals an Arcadia to him, which he circles around in ever more variations as a place of longing, and this in a reduction of drawing and content that, if one does not want to shy away from comparison with modernism, is reminiscent of conceptual art and abstraction.

Facts

• First monograph in 80 years on the illustrator Heinrich Dreber
• Edition Fichter, Frankfurt am Main 2020
• Language: German
• Hardcover with dust jacket
• 192 pages with 110 illustrations
• 28 x 21 cm; 2 kilogram
• ISBN: 978-3-947313-05-1

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