24 August 1901 – 29 August 1978, was a German sculptor, painter, graphic artist, photographer, inventor, and writer. Born in Vohwinkel-Sonnborn, he initially worked in an impressionist style before turning toward Cubism around 1919, a shift that also shaped his early sculptural work.

From 1921, he studied at the Bauhaus in Weimar and became a member of the De Stijl group, contributing from 1922 onward to the journal De Stijl and attending courses taught by Theo van Doesburg. He participated in the First International Congress of Progressive Artists in Düsseldorf in 1922. In 1924, together with Hans Richter and Piet Mondrian, he co-edited the journal G: Zeitschrift für Elementare Gestaltung, positioning himself at the center of European avant-garde discourse.

During the second half of the 1920s, he increasingly worked as a writer, editor, and organizer. In 1928, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe appointed him head of publicity for the Werkbund exhibition Die Wohnung at the Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart, for which he edited and published accompanying volumes. He was also involved in the landmark Werkbund exhibition Film und Foto (1929). Drawing directly from this exhibition, he produced the photobook Es kommt der neue Fotograf!(1929), published in an edition of 5,000 copies. The book became a key manifesto of the “New Photography,” articulating modernist photographic principles aligned with experimentation, abstraction, and new visual perspectives.

From 1931 to 1932, he taught photography at the Reimann School in Berlin. In 1934, he emigrated via Spain to Switzerland, where he spent the years of the Second World War as a teacher and writer. After 1946, he developed one of the earliest miniature cameras. From 1950 onward, he returned more fully to painting and taught at the Folkwang School in Essen between 1951 and 1958. He died in 1978 in Blacksburg, Virginia. His estate was transferred to the Museum Wiesbaden in 2009.

Reference:
Biography text from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA), German edition. Retrieved January 19, 2026.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Graeff