Trees Against the Sky

1946

The art of Karl Schrag, a German émigré to the United States in 1938, was liberated by the war’s end, when he allowed himself to move from politically positioned subjects to the more neutral art of landscape. In 1945 he also began to remake his stylistic approach under the influence of the innovative British printmaker William Stanley Hayter, joining Hayter’s studio, Atelier 17, in Greenwich Village. In both his prints and paintings, Schrag developed a more abstracted use of line with the aim of heightening the sense of motion in the images.