Käthe Kollwitz’s masterful depictions of suffering:“Loving and Letting Go: Personal Moments in the Work of Käthe Kollwitz”

The personal and the political
Käthe Kollwitz’s masterful depictions of suffering

The artist, best known for her prints of the working class, drew on her own experiences of tragedy
Books, arts and culture
Prospero


Jul 20th 2020

BY K.F. | COLOGNE





IN THE PRENZLAUER Berg district in Berlin are a school, a museum and a neighbourhood named in Käthe Kollwitz’s honour. She was an accomplished painter and draughtswoman as well as a prolific printmaker; in 1920 she became the first woman elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts. Today, Kollwitzkiez is trendy and upmarket—a far cry from the dilapidated environs of Kollwitz’s day. It was here that the artist honed her talent for portraying the downtrodden, sketching impoverished patients in the waiting room of her husband’s medical practice.

Born in 1867 in Königsberg, East Prussia (now Russian Kaliningrad), to left-wing parents, Kollwitz understood inequality from a young age. Her father, wanting to instil a sense of independence in his children, encouraged her to take long walks around the city. It was on these excursions that she developed an interest in what she called “workmen types”.


Her depictions of starving children and exploited workers contradicted the Prussian empire’s self-aggrandising image in the late 19th century. Kollwitz used figuration and tonality to cutting effect, rendering scenes of suffering in stark monochrome. In “A Weavers’ Revolt” (1893-97), a series of six prints, she dramatised protests against the mechanisation of the weaving industry. (Unlike “The Weavers”, a play of 1892 by Gerhart Hauptmann which fictionalised a real uprising in the 1840s, Kollwitz portrayed her workers in contemporary clothing.) It would have won her the gold medal in the Great Berlin Art exhibition in 1898, were it not for Kaiser Wilhelm II’s dismissal of the work as “gutter art”.

Even in this early series, Kollwitz utilised a deft command of printing techniques to distill a sense of misery. The dark interior of the first etching, “Need”, creates a desolate mood; a dense network of scratched lines emphasises the weavers’ cramped living conditions. In “Death”, Kollwitz uses contrasting shading to draw the eye towards a child’s lifeless face at the centre of the composition. A recurring mother figure haunts the narrative. Whether mourning her dead child, joining an angry mob storming the gates of a manufacturer’s mansion or observing the fatalities of the crushed revolt, her head and shoulders are slumped in a grief-stricken state.

This figure offers an interesting clue to Kollwitz’s oeuvre and her self-appointed role as “the voice of the silence of the sacrificed”. “Loving and Letting Go”, an exhibition at the Käthe Kollwitz Museum in Cologne marking the 75th anniversary of her death in April 1945, looks at how the artist drew on her own sorrow to give her work its emotive power. Three of her siblings died in childhood, and a son and a grandson in war, and these losses shaped her art.

“The Peasants’ War” (1901-08), another series gleaned from German history, follows a similar drama of suffering, rebellion and defeat to “A Weavers’ Revolt”. After the peasants’ furious charge against their feudal lords, a thick darkness falls over the battlefield. The viewer can just about make out the silhouette of a woman bending over a mass of bodies, shining a lantern over her dead son’s face.

Kollwitz made several preparatory drawings for the “Battlefield" sheet using her youngest son, Peter, as a model. “I did a drawing of myself, holding him on my arm, in front of the mirror. That was very exhausting and I groaned,” she wrote. “Then he said in his little child’s voice: ‘Stop groaning, mum, it is going to be very beautiful.’” These works were eventually turned into separate lithographs, and their intimacy makes them among the artist’s most poignant creations.

After Peter was killed in action in 1914, Kollwitz campaigned for pacifism and social change. Her works also became bolder and more emphatic, as the delicate intaglio of earlier pieces were replaced by darker and more economical woodcuts better suited to expressing the mood of Weimar Germany. In “Hunger” (1923), the skeletal figures of a mother and child are made visible through the white accentuation of their bones. The mother claws at her face, wailing over the dead child in her lap, in a composition redolent of Michelangelo’s “Pietà”. In “The Grieving Parents”, a war memorial which took almost two decades to complete, two figures kneel, hugging themselves close, their eyes cast down.

Kollwitz returned to depictions of mothers and children as a way of forcing the public to confront the effects of poverty and war on families. Their hollow eyes stare out at the viewer in “Survivors” (1923); their terror, as they cower under the figure of death in “Vienna is dying! Save its Children!” (1920), is palpable. It is clear that her own bereavement influenced the acute sense of pain in these works. But if this was catharsis, it was a very communal form: her grief was made accessible by her chosen medium of affordable and easily disseminated prints.

Kollwitz’s pacifism brought about the end of her artistic career. Her vocal opposition to Nazism led to her dismissal from the Academy of Arts and she was never again permitted to exhibit her work in Germany during her lifetime. Her home in Berlin was destroyed along with many of her works in 1943, and she died shortly before the end of the second world war. Seventy-five years on, however, her legacy as one of Germany’s most treasured artists is established. A statue of her in Kollwitzplatz depicts her sitting, hand resting in her lap, contemplating the city around her.

“Loving and Letting Go: Personal Moments in the Work of Käthe Kollwitz” continues at Käthe Kollwitz Museum, Cologne, until September 20th