Käthe Kollwitz: Prints, Process, Politics

Getty Center, Los Angeles

3 DEC 2019 - 29 MAR 2020

Never one to shy away from the realities of human suffering, Käthe Kollwitz used her art to document the impact of the turbulence and wars that dominated German life during the first half of the 20th century. This exhibition presents prints and drawings selected from the Dr. Richard A. Simms collection, which entered the holdings of the Getty Research Institute in 2016. Find out more from the Getty’s website.

Preview the exhibition below | View Apollo’s Art Diary here

In Memoriam Karl Liebknecht (1920), Käthe Kollwitz.

Kollwitz was greatly disturbed by the news in January 1919 that the Communist leader Karl Liebknecht had been assassinated together with Rosa Luxembourg by the paramilitary Freikorps. Their deaths triggered a wave of public mourning, reflected here in Kollwitz’s depiction of the weeping crowds around Liebknecht’s deathbed.

Woman with Dead Child (1903), Käthe Kollwitz.

Kollwitz is particularly celebrated for her monumental figurative sculptures; these find an echo in this drawing of two bodies entwined into one solid mass. Multiple versions reveal that the artist carefully fine-tuned her study of a mother’s love devastated by grief.

One of seven prints in the series ‘Peasants’ War’ (1902–08), this work thrums with the energy of a charging mob, which is apparently being conducted by the peasant woman in the foreground. The figure was inspired by Black Anna, a real-life participant of a peasant revolt in 1525, which Kollwitz read about in Wilhelm Zimmerman’s General History of the Great Peasants’ War (1841).

Kollwitz’s son Peter died on the battlefield in 1914, a loss that shaped her pacifist views. A wide-ranging look at how the Great War affected both its soldiers and those left behind, ‘War’ (1918–1922/23) was Kollwitz’s first series of woodcuts. This work foregrounds a single shrouded woman, eerily skeletal and still, as she shields a young child from the nightmarish figures that surround them.

Kollwitz produced many self-portraits, and this example from towards the end of her life evinces not just the surface signs of ageing but also the serious, resolved demeanour of a woman who has spent several decades dwelling on the darkest aspects of human experience.

The Museum Without Walls/Le Musée Imaginaire

MWW Gallery of the Day (10/4/19)
Weimar I: George Grosz & the New Objectivity
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The Museum Without Walls/Le Musée Imaginaire 在 Weimar I: George Grosz & the New Objectivity 相簿中新增了 317 張相片。

2014年3月26日

"My aim is to be understood by everyone. I reject the 'depth' that people demand nowadays, into which you can never descend without a diving bell crammed with cabbalistic bullshit and intellectual metaphysics. This expressionistic anarchy has got to stop... A day will come when the artist will no longer be this bohemian, puffed-up anarchist but a healthy man working in clarity within a collectivist society." -- George Grosz on himself

If Goya often shocked his contemporaries with his depictions of war and gore and his often savage satirical forays, then George Grosz (1893-1959), his artistic descendant in many ways, is the "shock artist" par excellence of our era. After serving during World War I, he settled in Berlin and joined the Dada movement. Far more political than their counterparts in Zurich or Paris, the Berlin Dadaists turned their art against local figures and institutions of authority. In paintings, watercolors, and collages, Grosz mixed the schematic simplicities of popular illustration with Expressionist distortion, Futurist fragmentation, and the mordant accuracy of the realism known as the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity).

Grosz was first and foremost an urban artist. In his art, the modern city is a hellish, jostling place overpopulated by swinish capitalists, brutish soldiers, and degraded workers. Women are prostitutes or nouveaux riches hags. In his drawings, usually in pen and ink which he sometimes developed further with watercolor, Grosz did much to create the image most have of Berlin and the Weimar Republic in the 1920s. His draftsmanship was excellent although the works for which he is best known adopt a deliberately crude form of caricature.

One of the most prolific artists of Weimar Germany and a particular focus of hatred and scorn for Hitler and the Nazis, who made his work the centerpiece of their 1936 "Degenerate Art exhibit," Grosz fled his native Germany in 1933 and spent most of the rest of his life abroad, mainly in the U.S. Though the bulk of his work consists of pen-and-ink drawings, etchings and lithographs, his relatively few oil paintings are vivid in color and dramatic in form. The first part of this gallery -- over 200 pictures -- serves up a generous helping of all these arranged after the first few entries in chronological order of execution.

"It was during this period that my wife, who had been in Paris, returned with a copy of that sensational album of George Grosz’: Ecce Homo. What a revelation it was! Such unmitigated savagery, such sublime desperation, such remorseless excoriation! An enlightened madman, I thought. A Goya come to life. A more ferocious Goya than ever Goya was. And what magistral, devastating use of the water color medium." -- Henry Miller

The last section of the gallery presents in its entirety, "Ecce Homo" Grosz's best-known collection of graphic work, though an endorsement from Henry Miller should signal that this work is not for those with conventional tastes. Grosz published "Ecce Homo" in Berlin in 1922. The title (Latin for "Behold the Man") echoes the words of Pontius Pilate when presenting the crown-thorned Christ to the mob. For Grosz it probably translates better as "This is Man!" -- or even better -- "this is the society, Weimar Germany, we live in." And the 84 pen & ink drawings and 16 watercolors that comprise the work (chosen from Grosz's drawings of the previous three years) do not paint a flattering picture of that society. In Grosz's rendition it seems to be composed almost entirely of lechers, prostitutes, hypocrites and pompous asses. Nor are the pictures themselves pretty, drawn as they are in a deliberately crude style of caricature, as if Grosz, who firmly believed the true need not be beautiful, disdained to dignify his subject matter with polished craftsmanship. Oddly, the drawings are only tangentially political -- odd because Grosz was one of the great "political artists" and they were drawn during the period (1919-22) of his brief involvement with the German Communist Party.

As is true of all MWW galleries, this one contains commentaries which give background on the artist or work in question. (You may need to click "See More" to the right ofthe full-screen image to access these.)

See also these other galleries pertaining to the Weimar period:
* Weimar II: A Society on the Brink
* Weimar III: Otto Dix - Art as Testimony
* The Face of War: Francisco Goya & Otto Dix
* Max Beckmann -- The Artist as Exile
* Käthe Kollwitz & The Art of Empathy

Art and Design

2019年12月7日星期六