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Käthe
Kollwitz
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Käthe Kollwitz is regarded as one of the most important German painters of
the 20th century. She was born in 1867 in East Prussia, Germany. She
began to study art in art classes due to her father’s encouragement at the age
of 14. From 1898 to 1903, Käthe taught at the Berlin School of Women Artist and
during 1919 she became the first woman to be admitted to the Prussian Academy
of Arts in Berlin as a professor. She was also been running a printmaking
studio since 1928. Käthe was an artist during the German Expressionism movement,
in which she produced art in the forms of etching, lithography, and woodcut.
Her prints were usually carried out in black and white.
Käthe’s work served as an indictment of the social conditions in Germany
during the late 19th and early 20th century. She believed that art should
reflect the social conditions of the time that people were trying to ignore.
This led her to produce a series of work during the 1920’s that reflected her
concern with the tragedies of war, poverty stricken women and children, and
sick women who could barely nourish their children. Her first two series
revolved around those who were suffering due to consequences of the time and
the war. Much of her work was shaped greatly by her personal life, events, and
emotions that she had personally experienced.
Her personal life was brimming with hardships and heartache. The
tragedies began when she lost her son to World War I in 1914 and her grandson
to World War II. These losses contributed to her political sympathies and
another set of prints that showed mothers protecting their children. In 1932
she participated in a petitionary action against the Nazis, causing her to
become expelled from the Prussian Academy of Arts when Hitler came to power in
1933. She was forbidden to exhibit, and her art was classified as “degenerate”
and she soon lost her studio. Despite this, she decided to stay in Berlin,
however allied bombing during World War II later destroyed her house in 1943.
War. In 1945 she knew she was dying and said, ‘War accompanies me to the end”,
in which she died 2 weeks before the end of WWII on April 22nd 1945.
An enlarged version of a similar Kollwitz sculpture of her piece, Mother
with her Dead Son, was placed in 1993 at the center of New Guardhouse,
which serves as the Central Memorial of the Federal Republic of Germany for the
Victims of War and Dictatorship in Berlin. In addition, more than 40 German
schools are named after Kollwitz and two museums in Germany are dedicated
solely to her work. Käthe’s contributions to society are shown in novels and
she was a character in a documentary drama series called 14- Diaries of the
Great.
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| The Mothers (1923) |
Two popular and sentimental works of Käthe’s includes The Mothers and The Volunteers. In The
Mothers, Kollwitz shows the fear and grief shared by women and children
during World War I. The women are crowded together and supporting each other,
while the children hide under the wings of their mothers. They are mourning the
loss of a family member or a relative in the war. The mothers seem to be
creating a human shield for their children against an attack. The contrast
between black and white, with the vast expanse of white surrounding the people
in black, shows the solitude of the people who are left behind.
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| The Volunteers (1920) |
The Volunteers is the only print
in this series that shows actual combatants. In it we see a death figure
leading off a troop of boys, one of who is her own son Peter, who
volunteered to serve in the war at the very beginning, and was killed in
action, two months later. And that loss was something that Kollwitz was never
really able to recover from. The grief that is expressed was extremely personal
for her, and she wanted it to serve as a testament to the devastation of war.
She ended up sending it out on tour to a number of German cities in order to
get the message across.
Works cited:
1.Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art, and Society. 4th ed. New York, N.Y.: Thames and Hudson, 1990. Print.
2. http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=3201
3. http://www.mystudios.com/women/klmno/kollwitz.html
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