Käthe Kollwitz
Biography
Käthe Kollwitz was born on 8 July 1867, the daughter of Karl Schmidt, a
master mason and preacher of the free-religious community in Königsberg.7 In
1881-82, Kollwitz received her first art lessons from the engraver Rudolf
Maurer in Königsberg and attended the School for Women Artists in Berlin, where
she studied with the Swiss artist Karl Stauffer-Bern from 1885 until 1886.
Influenced by Max Klinger's prints, she abandoned painting and turned to
graphic art. She married Karl Kollwitz, a medical student, in 1891, and lived
with him in Berlin, where she had direct contact with the industrial working
class, who were her husband's patients and the subject matter of much of her
work.
Kollwitz was also concerned with the interrelated themes of death, war, and maternal
loss. Major works include the Weavers' Revolt(1895-98), a cycle of
prints based on Gerhart Hauptmann's 1893 drama The Weavers; The
Peasants' War (1908), a large-format cycle of prints that established
her reputation as one of Germany's most important printmakers; a steady series
of drawings published in the satirical magazine Simplicissimus; and
posters such as her well-known War--Never Again! (1924).
Kollwitz's professional success--marked by exhibitions in honor of her fiftieth
birthday in 1917, and her appointment as professor at the Preussische Akademie
der Künste in 1919--did not undermine her sense of social calling, reflected in
works entitled War, Departure and Death, andProletariat.
This affinity with socialist causes and communist politics led to the loss of
her position and studio at the Akademie when the National Socialists assumed
power in 1933. She was prohibited from exhibiting her work, and both her
husband Karl and her son Hans were prevented from practicing medicine. Some of
Kollwitz's work was included in Hitler's Entartete Kunst (Degenerate
Art) exhibition in Munich in 1937. During the same year she finished her
monumental sculpture Mother with Twins. Kollwitz died on 22 April
1945, after the loss of her husband, her grandson, her home, and studio, and
the destruction of most of her printing plates.
Käthe Schmidt Kollwitz (July 8, 1867 – April 22, 1945)
was a German painter, printmaker, and sculptor whose work
offered an eloquent and often searing account of the human condition in the
first half of the 20th century. Her empathy for the less fortunate, expressed
most famously through the graphic means of drawing, etching, lithography, and
woodcut, embraced the victims of poverty, hunger, and war.Initially her work
was grounded in Naturalism, and later took on Expressionistic qualities.
Kollwitz was born in Königsberg, Province of Prussia (now Kaliningrad,
Russia), the fifth child in her family. Her father, Karl Schmidt, was a radical
Social democrat who became a mason and house builder. Her mother, Katherina
Schmidt, was the daughter of Julius Rupp, a Lutheran pastor who was expelled
from the official State Church and founded an independent congregation. Her
education was greatly influenced by her grandfather's lessons in religion and
socialism. The early death of her younger brother Benjamin also left an
impression; in childhood Kollwitz was afflicted with anxiety.
Recognizing her talent, Kollwitz' father arranged for her to begin
lessons in drawing and copying plaster casts when she was twelve.[5]At
sixteen she began making drawings of working people, the sailors and peasants
she saw in her father's offices. Wishing to continue her studies at a time when
no colleges or academies were open to young women, Kollwitz enrolled in an art
school for women in Berlin. There she studied with Karl Stauffer-Bern, a friend
of the artist Max Klinger. The etchings of Klinger, their technique and social
concerns, were an inspiration to Kollwitz.
At the age of seventeen Kollwitz became engaged to Karl Kollwitz, a
medical student. In 1888 she went to Munich to study at the Woman's Art
School, where she realized her strength was not as a painter, but a draftsman.
In 1890 she returned to Koenigsberg, rented her first studio, and continued to
draw laborers.
In 1891 Kollwitz married Karl, by this time a doctor who tended to the
poor in Berlin, where the couple moved into the large apartment that would be
Kollwitz' home until it was destroyed in World War II.The proximity of her
husband's practice proved invaluable:
The motifs I was able to select
from this milieu (the workers' lives) offered me, in a simple and forthright
way, what I discovered to be beautiful.... People from the bourgeois sphere
were altogether without appeal or interest. All middle-class life seemed
pedantic to me. On the other hand, I felt the proletariat had guts. It was not
until much later....when I got to know the women who would come to my husband
for help, and incidentally also to me, that I was powerfully moved by the fate
of the proletariat and everything connected with its way of life....But what I
would like to emphasize once more is that compassion and commiseration were at
first of very little importance in attracting me to the representation of
proletarian life; what mattered was simply that I found it beautiful.
Between the births of her son Hans in 1892 and Peter in 1896, Kollwitz
saw a performance of Gerhart Hauptmann's "The Weavers", which
dramatized the oppression of the Silesian weavers in Langembielau and their
failed revolt in 1842.[8] Inspired, the artist ceased work on a
series of etchings she had intended to illustrateEmile Zola's Germinal, and
produced a cycle of six works on the weavers theme, three lithographs (Poverty, Death,
and Conspiracy) and three etchings with aquatint and sandpaper (March
of the Weavers, Riot, and The End). Not a literal
illustration of the drama, the works were a free and naturalistic expression of
the workers' misery, hope, courage, and, eventually, doom. The cycle was
exhibited publicly in 1898 to wide acclaim. But when Adolf Menzelnominated
her work for the gold medal of the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung in
Berlin, Kaiser Wilhelm II withheld his approval. Nevertheless, The
Weavers became Kollwitz' most widely acclaimed production.
Kollwitz' second major cycle of works was the Peasant War,
which, subject to many preliminary drawings and discarded ideas in lithography,
occupied her from 1902 to 1908. The Peasant War was a violent revolution which
took place in Southern Germany in the early years of the Reformation, beginning
in 1525; peasants who had been treated as slaves took arms against feudal lords
and the church. As was The Weavers, this subject, too, might have
been suggested by a Hauptmann drama, Florian Geyer. However, the initial source
of Kollwitz' interest dated to her youth, when she and her brother Konrad
playfully imagined themselves as barricade fighters in a revolution] The
artist identified with the character of Black Anna, a woman cited as a
protagonist in the uprising. When completed, the Peasant War consisted
of pieces in etching, aquatint, and soft ground: Plowing, Raped, Sharpening
the Scythe, Arming in the Vault,Outbreak, After
the Battle (which, eerily premonitory, features a mother searching
through corpses in the night, looking for her son), and The Prisoners.
In all, the works were technically more impressive than those of The
Weavers, owing to their greater size and dramatic command of light and
shadow. They are Kollwitz' highest achievements as an etcher.
While working on Peasant War, Kollwitz twice visited Paris,
and enrolled in classes at the Académie Julian in order to learn how to sculpt.[12] The
etching Outbreak was awarded the Villa Romana prize, which
provided for a year's stay, in 1907, in a studio in Florence. Although Kollwitz
did no work, she later recalled the impact of early Renaissance art.
Modernism and World War I
After her return Kollwitz continued to exhibit her work, but was
impressed by the work of younger compatriots--the Expressionists and
Bauhaus--and resolved to simplify her means of expression.[14]Subsequent
works such as Runover, 1910, and Self-Portrait, 1912,
show this new direction. She also continued to work on sculpture.
Kollwitz lost her youngest son Peter on the battlefield in World War I
in October 1914, prompting a prolonged depression. By the end of the year she
had made drawings for a monument to Peter and his fallen comrades; she
destroyed the monument in 1919, and began again in 1925.] The
memorial, entitled The Grieving Parents, was finally completed and
placed in the Belgian cemetery of Roggevelde in 1932. Later, when Peter's
grave was moved to the nearby Vladslo German war cemetery, the statues were
also moved.
In 1917, on her fiftieth birthday, the galleries of Paul Cassirer
provided a retrospective exhibition of one hundred and fifty drawings by
Kollwitz.
Kollwitz was a committed socialist and pacifist, who were eventually
attracted to communism; her political and social sympathies found expression in
the "memorial sheet for Karl Liebknecht", and in her involvement with
the Arbeitsrat für Kunst, a part of the Social Democratic Party
government in the first few weeks after the war. As the war wound down and a
nationalistic appeal was made for old men and children to join the fighting,
Kollwitz implored in a published statement:
There has been enough of dying!
Let not another man fall!
While working on the sheet for Karl Liebknecht, she found etching
insufficient for expressing monumental ideas. After viewing woodcuts by Ernst
Barlach at the Secession exhibitions, she completed the Liebknecht sheet in the
new medium, and made about thirty woodcuts by 1926.
In 1920 Kollwitz was elected a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts,
the first woman to be so honored. Membership entailed a regular income, a large
studio, and a full professorship
In the years that followed, her reaction to the war found a continuous
outlet. In 1922-23 she produced the cycle War in woodcut form,
including the works The Sacrifice, The Volunteers, The
Parents, The Widow I, The Widow II, The
Mothers, and The People. In 1924 she finished her three most
famous posters: Germany's Children Starving,Bread, and Never
Again War.
Later life and World War II
In 1933, after the establishment of the
National-Socialist regime, the Nazi Party authorities forced her to resign her
place on the faculty of the Akademie der Künste. Her work was
removed from museums. Although she was banned from exhibiting, some of her work
was used by the Nazis for propaganda.
Working now in a smaller studio, in the mid 1930s she completed her last
major cycle of lithographs, Death, which consisted of eight stones: Woman
Welcoming Death, Death with Girl in Lap, Death Reaches
for a Group of Children, Death Struggles with a Woman,Death
on the Highway, Death as a Friend, Death in the Water,
andThe Call of Death.
In July 1936 she and her husband were visited by the Gestapo, who
threatened her with arrest and deportation to a concentration camp; they
resolved to commit suicide if such a prospect became inevitable.[21] However,
Kollwitz was by now a figure of international note, and no further actions were
taken. On her seventieth birthday she "received over one hundred and fifty
telegrams from leading personalities of the art world", as well as offers
to house her in the United States, which she declined for fear of provoking
reprisals against her family.
She survived her husband (who died in 1940 from an illness) and her
grandson Peter, who died in action during World War II (in 1942).
She evacuated Berlin in 1943. Later that year her house was bombed, and
many drawings, prints, and documents were lost. She moved first to Nordhausen,
then to Moritzburg, a town near Dresden, where she lived her final months as a
guest of Prince Ernst Heinrich of Saxony.[22] Kollwitz died
just before the end of the war.
Kollwitz made a total of 275 prints, in etching, woodcut and
lithography. Virtually the only portraits she made during her life were images
of herself, of which there are at least fifty. These self-portraits constitute
a life-long honest self-appraisal; "they are psychological milestones.
Her silent lines penetrate the
marrow like a cry of pain; such a cry was never heard among the Greeks and
Romans.
Käthe Kollwitz is a subject within William T. Vollmann's Europe
Central, a 2005 National Book Award winner for fiction. In the book,
Vollmann describes the lives of those touched by the fighting and events
surrounding World War II in Germany and the Soviet Union. Her chapter is
entitled "Woman with Dead Child", after her sculpture of the same
name.
An enlarged version of a similar Kollwitz sculpture, Mother with
her Dead Son, was placed in 1993 at the center of Neue Wache in Berlin,
which serves as a monument to "the Victims of War and Tyranny".
