The medium of drawing was exploited by Stephan von Huene in manifold ways. Not only did he produce drawings throughout his life, but also taught draftsmanship. He would often close a letter with a signature drawing which showed a hand holding a pencil, which it used to trace out a curving line. Among draftsmen, he esteemed in particular Albrecht Dürer, Honoré Daumier, and Gustave Doré.
Drawings
Von Huene’s œuvre contains three wide-ranging cycles of drawings, beginning in 1964 with the Pasadena Ink Drawings, which depict metamorphoses of humans, animals, and monsters. The occasional orchestration of the body accounts for the muted tone. The Pasadena Ink Drawings, in each of which an isolated figure is delineated and then subdivided into its body parts, depict not turbulent scenes, but instead, in each case, a segmented body-landscape. The figures in the black Smoke Drawings originate with the imprint of a finger or the heel of the hand, after which a stylus was used to circumscribe the contours.
