Käthe Kollwitz

German artist

• Born: July 8, 1867
• Birthplace: Königsberg, East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia)
• Died: April 22, 1945
• Place of death: Moritzburg, Germany

Kollwitz was one of the most talented graphic artists of the early twentieth century. While her art was clearly social and political in meaning, her mastery of light and form resulted in a purely aesthetic statement that has seldom been equaled in the graphic arts. She was also a renowned sculptor and painter.

Early Life

Käthe Kollwitz (KAYT-yeh KOHL-vihts) was the fifth child of well-educated parents. Her mother, Katherina, was the daughter of Julius Rupp, a nonconformist Lutheran minister who left the state church to found the first Free Congregational Church in Germany, a group that emphasized rationalism and ethics. Kollwitz’s father, Karl Schmidt, was a lawyer, a follower of Karl Marx, and an activist in the Social Democratic Workers’ Party who, finding his socialist beliefs in conflict with the militaristic regime of Otto von Bismarck, gave up the practice of law to become a master mason and a successful builder. Kollwitz’s later reminiscences of her childhood recall the warmth, the social and moral idealism, and the mutual respect for the rights and freedom of others that characterized her family’s thinking and that strongly influenced her own development.

Karl Schmidt was an enlightened father who encouraged his daughters to develop their individual talents, looking beyond the traditional female roles of wife and mother. An avid reader, the young Kollwitz was drawn especially to the works of Émile Zola, Henrik Ibsen, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevski, Gerhart Hauptmann, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe naturalistic works that dealt with the social problems of contemporary society. Another author who contributed to her intellectual development was August Bebel, whose pioneering treatise on the social and economic emancipation of women, Die Frau und der Sozialismus (1879; Woman Under Socialism, 1904), argued that capitalism had enslaved women and only socialism could free them from their second-class status. This, combined with her father’s influence, did much to shape Kollwitz’s own socialist outlook on life as a woman and as an artist.

At an early age, Kollwitz also evidenced an interest in the visual arts and a talent for drawing. Her father, determined to develop this potential, provided her with the best training available. Since women were denied admission to the Königsberg Academy of Art, she studied privately with the engraver Rudolf Mauer and later with Émile Neide, a local painter of some renown. In 1885-1886, she studied with Karl Stauffer-Bern at the Art School for Women in Berlin, and then, in 1888-1889, she worked with Ludwig Herterich at the Women’s School of Art of the Munich Academy. As her taste in the visual arts matured, it paralleled her taste in literature; she was primarily drawn to artists whose work reflected the problems of contemporary life Rembrandt, Francisco de Goya, William Hogarth, and Honoré Daumier. She was also excited by Max Klinger’s graphic series, particularly Ein Leben (1883; a life), which is an indictment of the moral hypocrisy of the double standard held against women.

Life’s Work

In 1891, Kollwitz married Karl Kollwitz of Berlin, despite the disapproval of her father and of her former colleagues at the Women’s School of Art in Munich, who looked on marriage as a betrayal of one’s commitment to art. Kollwitz, however, never doubted her ability to combine her role as an artist with that of wife and mother and had wisely realized that she would have more freedom as a wife in Berlin than as an unmarried woman in her father’s home in provincial Königsberg. She was fortunate that, throughout their long marriage, her husband shared her socialist beliefs, encouraged her independence, and was supportive of her work.

Her husband’s medical practice in a Berlin working-class neighborhood gave Kollwitz an immediate and intense experience of the problems and hardships of the lower classes, and this experience began to interact with her art, which she now perceived as an effective instrument to help achieve the political changes that she believed would result in a better society with equality and justice for all. Disdaining the idea of art for art’s sake, she proclaimed that her art had a social function, that she wanted to be effective in a time when people were so helpless and destitute, Throughout her career, she drew her subjects from the same sources that had inspired Rembrandt, Goya, and Daumier the downtrodden, the poor, and the oppressed. She had, however, a greater awareness of the particular responsibilities, sorrows, and joys of women in the lower classes.

Early in her career, Kollwitz chose to work in the graphic media prints and drawings rather than painting. She was undoubtedly influenced by Klinger, whose depictions of workers victimized by social forces beyond their control illustrated his belief, as stated in a treatise written in 1885, that graphic artists tend to criticize while painters idealize the world. He emphasized that beauty, optimism, and glorification of the world relate to painting but that the graphic arts express all the resignation, weakness, nonfulfillment, and misery of poor creatures struggling between will and ability. Kollwitz realized that the graphic medium was best suited to the creation of an art with social content and would also allow her to reach a broader audience.

In 1897, Kollwitz completed the first of her many print cycles, A Weavers’ Revolt , which was inspired by a play by Hauptmann about a workers’ revolt in 1844. Her other notable graphic cycles include The Peasants’ War (1902-1908), War (1922-1923), Proletariat (1925), and Death (1934-1935), all of which express the moral and ethical issues so central to her work.

Kollwitz sometimes used the past to interpret the present, as in A Weavers’ Revolt and The Peasants’ War, which is thematically related to the sixteenth century exploitation of German peasants. A significant innovation in this latter cycle is her interpretation of woman as revolutionary. The romantic concept of woman as a muse or an allegorical figure inspiring revolution was traditional in Western art; in this series, however, Kollwitz depicted a flesh-and-blood woman actually leading the revolt.

In other instances, Kollwitz’s art was more directly related to current events, as in War and Proletariat, which were generated by her son Peter’s death in World War I and the subsequent unstable political conditions in Germany. She also expressed her strong socialist, and now pacifist, beliefs in other themes that appeared with variations in numerous prints, drawings, and sculptures mothers and children, whom she frequently depicted as the helpless and abandoned victims of war.

Despite initial governmental opposition to her critical social content (Kaiser Wilhelm labeled it “gutter art”), Kollwitz gradually gained recognition for her work. She exhibited regularly at the Berlin Free Art Exhibition from 1893 until 1936, when her work was banned by the Nazis, and she won a gold medal in Dresden in 1899 for A Weavers’ Revolt. In 1898, she was appointed to the faculty of the Berlin School for Women Artists and also joined the Berlin Secession. In 1907, she received the Villa Romana Prize, enabling her to study in Italy, and by 1909, her drawings were being published in the journal Simplicissimus. In 1919, she was the first woman elected to membership in the Prussian Academy of Arts and was director of graphic arts there from 1928 to 1933, resigning with the advent of the Nazi era. In 1926, she was one of the founders of the Society for Women Artists and Friends of Art, a group dedicated to bringing women’s art before the public.

In 1904, Kollwitz made her first trip to Paris, studying sculpture at the Académie Julien and visiting August Rodin’s studio in Meudon. When she took up sculpture in 1910, Rodin’s influence was apparent. From 1914 to 1932, much of her creative effort was devoted to Mourning Parents , a sculpture originally conceived as a tombstone for her son, Peter, but finally executed as a public monument symbolizing all bereaved parents and commemorating all victims of war. Additionally, the many small bronzes that she created from 1933 to 1943 constitute some of her most powerful statements about the misery, suffering, and anguish brought on by war.

After 1933, Kollwitz was silenced by the Nazis, making the last years of her life difficult ones. Earlier, in the brief period of the Weimar Republic, Kollwitz had achieved a public recognition that enabled her to carry on a meaningful dialogue with her audience. Now, however, her work having been labeled “degenerate,” she lost her studio and teaching position at the academy, and she was not allowed to exhibit or publish; thus her art was literally banned from public view, and she suffered an isolation that was more complete and restrictive than that of the Wilhelminian era. Nevertheless, she continued to work in her studio in Berlin until she was evacuated to Moritzburg in 1944. She had lost both her husband (1940) and her grandson Peter (killed in battle in 1942) as well as the home in Berlin that she had occupied all of her married life. She died on April 22, 1945, at age seventy-seven, only a few weeks before World War II ended in Europe.

Significance

If Kollwitz’s themes were often controversial, her style and technique were not. She was never interested in the stylistic and technical innovations that occupied so many early twentieth century artists. That does not mean that her style was stagnant, with no growth or development. Her early works were in a naturalist style, using traditional spatial and compositional arrangements with careful attention to detail, although, even then, she avoided the merely descriptive and anecdotal. As her style matured, she grew increasingly aware of the expressive possibilities of reduced forms and simplified composition, and, as she sought greater simplicity in her work, she learned, as had Titian, Rembrandt, and Frans Hals, that “less is more.” Therefore, the expressive power of her mature work comes not only from its emotional subject matter but also from light playing on its concentrated, monumental forms arranged in simple compositions.

Throughout her long career, Kollwitz created more than ninety self-portraits, and these certainly constitute one of her most lasting contributions to the world’s art. Not since Rembrandt had an artist accomplished such an intimate self-revelation. These self-portraits chart her development as an artist and as a woman, revealing through line, form, and light her moods, her joys and sorrows, her doubts, and her convictions.

Bibliography

Kearns, Martha. Käthe Kollwitz: Woman and Artist. Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1976. The first biography of Kollwitz written from a contemporary female perspective. Kearns’s major resources were Kollwitz’s own writings, such as her many letters and her diary, parts of which were printed here for the first time in English.

Klein, Mina C., and H. Arthur Klein. Käthe Kollwitz: Life in Art. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972. Contains many excellent reproductions of Kollwitz’s graphic works and sculpture. Intending the book for the general reader, the authors avoided a formal, art-historical analysis of Kollwitz’s work. A very readable biography, with especially good coverage of the years after 1933.

Kollwitz, Käthe. Kaethe Kollwitz. Introduction by Carl Zigrosser. New York: George Braziller, 1951. Contains reproductions of seventy of Kollwitz’s works, including the complete cycles: A Weavers’ Revolt, The Peasants’ War, War, Proletariat, and Death. The accompanying monograph is informative but often patronizing.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Prints and Drawings of Käthe Kollwitz. Edited by Carl Zigrosser. New York: Dover, 1969. A revised and enlarged version of Zigrosser’s 1951 publication. The quality of the reproductions was much improved, and several important works were added. The text itself remained basically unchanged, however, with the author’s bias of gender and class still apparent.

Nagel, Otto. Käthe Kollwitz. Translated by Stella Humphries. Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1971. This book’s most valuable feature is its extensive catalog of Kollwitz’s works. That Nagel was acquainted with Kollwitz from 1920 on leads one to expect a greater wealth of new information and a more perceptive analysis of her work than is actually the case.