Käthe Kollwitz (born Käthe Schmidt, Königsberg, July 8, 1867-Moritzburg, April 22, 1945) was a German printmaker, painter and sculptor. The violence of the wars of her context, as well as the loss of a son during World War I, significantly marked the production of her works, and that has made her one of the most popular figures of German art of the intercentury today.
Käthe Kollwitz's Biography
Her parents were Karl Schmidt (1825-1898) and Katharina Rupp (1837-1925). His father studied law but, because of his social democratic views, could not find employment in Prussia, and worked as a master mason. His mother was the daughter of the Lutheran preacher Julius Rupp. He had three siblings: Julie, Lisbeth and Conrad Schmidt.
His education and art were greatly influenced by his grandfather in religion and by his father in socialism.
Kollwitz spent his childhood from 1867 to 1885 in Königsberg (Prussia). Noticing her talent, Kollwitz's father pulled some strings so that she began drawing lessons and copying plaster casts at the age of twelve. At the age of sixteen she began to draw pictures of workers, sailors and peasants she saw in her father's offices.
Wanting to continue her studies in a context where universities were not 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, whom she also had the opportunity to meet. Klinger's prints, his technique and his social concerns, were an inspiration to Kollwitz.
Artistic beginnings of Käthe Kollwitz
Returning to Königsberg in 1887, she began her pictorial production under the supervision of the painter Emil Neide. The following two years, 1888-89, she enrolled at the Munich School for Women Artists, where she was taught by Ludwig Herterich. She returned to Königsberg in the same year, where she established her first studio and began to produce her paintings professionally and independently, as well as producing her first etching.
In 1891 she married Dr. Karl Köllwitz. Both moved to Berlin, where they settled in one of the poorest districts of the capital, where her husband worked both as a doctor and as an active socialist militant. Her husband's active militancy had a significant influence on Käthe Kollwitz's artistic works, as the vision of the miserable living conditions of the working class and her political activism were central themes in her early works.
The following year her son Hans Kollwitz was born, and in 1896 her second son, Peter Kollwitz, was born.
In 1898 Käthe Kollwitz began teaching at the Berlin School for Women Artists, where she remained until 1903, and in 1910 she began her sculpture production.
Käthe Kollwitz's influence of World War I
In 1914 his son Peter was killed in action in Flanders at the outbreak of the First World War. The loss of his son further contributed to his socialist and pacifist political sympathies. In 1919 she worked on a commemorative woodcut dedicated to Karl Liebknecht, the revolutionary socialist assassinated that same year.
Käthe believed that art should reflect the social conditions of the time, and during the 1920s she produced a series of works that reflected her preoccupation with the themes of the war: poverty, working-class life, and the lives of ordinary women.
Despite the unpopularity of her opposition to the war, in 1919 she was appointed a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts and became the first woman to hold a seat in that institution, where she remained until her forced resignation in 1933 because of the rise to power of Hitler's National Socialist party, as was the case with so many other members of her artistic generation.
The Seven Etchings
Between 1920 and 1925 he made the series Seven Xylographs on the War, published in 1924 together with the portfolio Departure and Death, and the following year he published the series entitled The Proletariat; all of them of strong social criticism that denounced the most painful conditions of the war and the social injustices of the moment.
These woodcuts focus on the anguish suffered by the wives, parents and children whose men fought and died in the war. In The Sacrifice, a new mother offers her baby as a sacrifice to the cause.
In The Widow II, a woman and her baby lie huddled together, perhaps starving to death. Volunteers is the only print to show the fighters. In it, Kollwitz's son Peter takes his place beside Death, who leads a band of young men in an ecstatic procession to war.
These impressions express the raw agony that war inflicts on humanity. In The Widow I, a woman embraces herself in anguish. Her rounded form and the tender touch of her massive hands on her chest and abdomen suggest that she may be pregnant, lending further poignancy to her situation. In Las Madres, a group of women locked in a tight embrace comfort each other, while two frightened children peek out from under their protective group.
In The Volunteers, four young men, whose stricken faces and clenched fists betray their sense of doom and determination, volunteer to fight as they follow a drumming figure in a death mask. Pain and torment permeate each of these images, graphically conveyed by the rough cuts of the woodcut medium. Kollwitz's seven war prints is one of several portfolios of prints by German artists that focus on the savagery of the First World War.
But instead of showing the brutalities of war and the bombardment experienced by soldiers, the artist portrays the emotional responses of civilians. Although her sense of loss was very personal because of the loss of her youngest son, Peter, Kollwitz depicts universal visions of the infinite sadness war creates for those left behind.
The work is currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoMA) in New York.
Käthe Kollwitz's Short trip to Russia
In 1927 she made a brief trip to Russia, to the Volga region, a country to which she felt politically linked, although that feeling soon turned into deep disappointment when she contemplated the harsh and threatened peasant life and witnessed even cannibalism and other horrors of communist Russia, and returned that same year to Germany.
The influence of the Nazi regime
As soon as the Nazis came to power, Kollwitz was a victim of the harassment that characterized Adolf Hitler's regime against avant-garde artists. His works were included in the Exhibition of Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) held in Berlin, whose inauguration took place on July 19, 1937 and was in charge of the president of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts.
About 650 paintings, sculptures and drawings from German museums and collections, selected from more than 16,000 works, were presented with the aim of ridiculing fashionable art.
Parallel to this exhibition, the regime organized an official art exhibition, the Exhibition of Great German Art (Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellug) or National Socialist Art, whose inauguration was presided over by Hitler himself. Paradoxically, contrary to the intentions of the organizers of both, the former received two million visitors, compared to the scarce half a million of the latter.
The period between 1937 and 1944 was particularly tragic for Köllwitz. To the continuous pressures of the Nazi regime was added the destruction of his studio with practically all his works during the Allied bombing raids.
This vital pessimism is perceived in her last series of engravings, Death (composed of eight lithographs), which seems to foresee the death of her husband in 1940 and her own death on April 22, 1945, shortly before the end of the war, in Moritzburg, where she had moved two years earlier to the residence of a relative with the intention of hiding.
Käthe Kollwitz's Legacy
Kollwitz produced a total of 275 woodcuts and lithographs. Virtually the only portraits she made during her lifetime were images of herself, of which there are at least fifty.
Today, perhaps her most iconic work is an enlarged version of a similar sculpture by Kollwitz, Mother with her Dead Child, better known as The Kollwitz Pieta, which was placed in 1993 in the center of the Neue Wache in Berlin, serving as a memorial to the victims of war and tyranny.
Four museums, in Berlin, Cologne and Moritzburg and the Käthe Kollwitz Museum in Koekelare, are dedicated exclusively to her work.
The Käthe Kollwitz Prize, formalized in 1960, bears her name.
Tributes and exhibitions have been paid to her frequently. In 2017, Google Doodle honored Kollwitz's 150th birthday. An exhibition, Portrait of the Artist: Käthe Kollwitz was held at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England, from September 13 to November 26, 2017.