Friends,
I
was profoundly moved by the Kathe Kollwitz exhibit at the National Gallery many
years ago. But actually I became acquainted with her art through the
now-deceased Ted Klitzke. After World War II, Ted and his wife lived in
Germany. One day the wife came home and told Ted that she had sold the
Volkswagen in order to buy numerous Kollwitz prints. I never met his
wife, but I knew Ted when he was a dean at the Maryland College Institute of
Art. And when I worked for the American Friends Service Committee, Ted
brought some of the prints over to the building and did a presentation of this
great artist’s work. This is an artist who knew about suffering, and used her
art to present the suffering of the working class. Kagiso, Max
Published
on Portside (https://portside.org/)
The Radical Printmaking of Käthe Kollwitz
Billy
Anania
December
18, 2021
Jacobin
In
our times, expressionism is often conflated with the movement that succeeded it
in the United States — abstract expressionism. Mid-century painters like
Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko blurred away all traces of realism in a highly
expressive, and individualistic, mode of painting that aligned with
US propaganda during the Cold War. Decades before drip painting and
the Seagram murals hit the American art world, expressionist artists
in Europe were concerned with a figurative style capable of responding to war
and economic hardship at the turn of the twentieth century.
Among
the most prominent of these artists was Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945). Coming of
age amid rapid industrialization in Germany, Kollwitz worked across painting,
sculpture, and printmaking, helping to give expressionism its radical
consciousness.
In
lithographs, etchings, and woodcuts, Kollwitz portrayed scenes of poverty and
class warfare, devoid of color, using only line and shadow. As a propagandist
and educator, she worked with socialist organizations to criticize inequality
and oppression under the German Empire, Weimar Republic, and Third Reich. Her
monochromatic designs, which appeared on posters and pamphlets, revived an
aesthetic form of protest developed during the German Peasants’ War. That
she herself produced an iconic print cycle on the sixteenth-century uprising
speaks to her sustaining the old cause with the old tools.
Kollwitz
was the first woman admitted to the Prussian Academy of Arts. However, her
success was cut short when the Nazis banned her work. Dying just sixteen days
before Victory in Europe Day, she never saw the ban lifted. Her experience
losing children in both world wars led to a preoccupation with motherhood as
the first line of defense. From peasant matrons sharpening scythes to mothers
leading a weavers’ revolt, Kollwitz’s women subjects transcend their
traditional gender roles to rebel against the capitalist order that
necessitated their poverty. Despite the many trials she experienced, Kollwitz’s
faith in socialism speaks to her sacrifices as a working artist who brought
print to a higher plane of social commentary.
Crumbling Empire
Käthe
Schmidt was born into a progressive religious family in conservative Prussia.
Her maternal grandfather, Julius Rupp, founded the first Free Religious
Congregation, and her father, Karl, was a Marxist member of the Social
Democratic Party (SPD). Together, these men influenced her intellectual
development. “Father was nearest to me because he had been my guide to
socialism,” she wrote to a friend. “But behind that concept stood Rupp, whose
traffic was not with humanity, but with God. . . . To this day I do not know
whether the power which has inspired my works is something related to religion,
or is indeed religion itself.”
Käthe
Kollwitz, “Uprising” (1899). Line etching, drypoint, aquatint, brush etching,
sand paper, some roulette. (Wikimedia Commons)
“Little
Käthe,” as her family called her, was the fifth of seven children, three of
whom died young. Her mother Katharina’s stoicism was formative for Käthe’s
early notions of parenthood. The artist was prone to anxiety attacks and
suffered from dysmetropsia, or “Alice in Wonderland syndrome,” which distorted
her perception of size and self. These early experiences marked her
introduction to art-making.
Originally
trained in painting, Käthe was drawn to the work of the realist artist Max
Liebermann — who painted Germany’s working class — as well as the
naturalist literary movement. It was after reading Max Klinger’s
essay Painting and Drawing that she delved into printmaking,
thanks to Klinger’s championing of the medium and its potential for poetic
invention. Her earliest series, monochromatic line etchings adapted from Émile
Zola’s 1885 novel Germinal, brought together these influences
by depicting a miners’ revolt violently suppressed by the French police and
military.
Käthe
Kollwitz, “March of the Weavers” (1893–97), sheet 4 of the cycle A
Weavers’ Revolt . Line etching and sandpaper. (Wikimedia Commons)
In
1891, Käthe married Karl Kollwitz, a doctor and SPD councilman who ran a clinic
for Berlin’s working class. Through Karl, she met impoverished mothers and
children, who would stay after their appointments to chat with her. Kollwitz
soon became a mother herself, giving birth to sons Hans and Peter. Despite the
labor of motherhood, Karl worked to ensure that Käthe could sustain an art
career while they raised children.
Kollwitz’s
first artistic breakthrough came after experiencing Gerhart Hauptmann’s naturalist
play The Weavers, which dramatized an 1844 workers’ uprising
against poor living conditions and low wages. Her print cycle A
Weavers’ Revolt (1893–97) adapts the story across six sheets. The
first three provide exposition: a family watches over a dying child in a
cramped house filled with weaving looms, leading the father to conspire with
fellow workers in a dimly lit barroom. The next two sheets exchange darkness
for daylight, showing workers marching with pickaxes and mothers carrying
children. In “Storming the Gate,” women lead an attack on a capitalist’s home.
Kollwitz juxtaposes their dirty clothing with the lavish gate design, which is
overtaken by workers’ hands.
Käthe
Kollwitz, “Storming the Gate” (1893-97), sheet 5 of the cycle A Weavers’
Revolt. Line etching and sandpaper. (Wikimedia Commons)
Men
carry away dead weavers in the final sheet, revealing subtle Christian
themes of martyrdom and suffering. Biographer Martha
Kearns notes that A Weavers’ Revolt “transformed”
Kollwitz into “an artist who celebrated revolution.” After seeing the work at
the Great Berlin Art Exhibition, a Prussian awards jury proposed nominating
her, but Kaiser Wilhelm II refused. This decision, along with a highly
publicized closing of Edvard Munch’s first major exhibition, led
Kollwitz and several jury members — including Liebermann — to organize
the Berlin Secession. From then through the German Revolution, Kollwitz’s
art became inextricably linked with anti-imperialism, leading to further
breakthroughs that converged with personal tragedy.
Printing Revolution
The
turn of the twentieth century brought Kollwitz to Paris and London, where she
studied European art history. While abroad, she created the large-scale
etching La Carmagnole, which depicts a scene of French
revolutionary women dancing to a battle hymn from Charles
Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. That same year, she began her
second major print cycle inspired by Wilhelm Zimmermann’s illustrated
history of the German Peasants’ War, which Friedrich Engels viewed as the
first revolutionary worker uprising of the modern era.
Käthe
Kollwitz, “Sharpening the Scythe” (1908), sheet 3 of the cycle Peasants’ War.
Line etching, drypoint, sandpaper, aquatint, and soft ground with imprint of
laid paper and Ziegler’s transfer paper. (Wikimedia Commons)
The
seven screens of Peasants’ War (1901–8) follow a similar
narrative to the weavers. Two opening sheets show a plowman bending to the
earth and a woman embedded in dirt after being raped. The next frame,
“Sharpening the Scythe,” portrays a tense older woman with tired eyes
running a whetstone across a long blade. Only two sheets show the actual war,
with a sea of peasant warriors fighting night and day, led by a peasant named
Black Anna. This is followed by the haunting “Battlefield,” in which an elderly
woman makes contact with a young man’s corpse; her veiny hand and his face
appear illuminated at the point of contact. The series concludes with
survivors tightly packed in an open-air prison.
Peasants’
War was a major success, and Kollwitz’s work was quickly acquired by
institutions like the British Museum and New York Public Library. She ensured
wide accessibility to her work by producing in high volume and selling at low
cost. This meant allowing her work to be reproduced, and, in 1908, she began
contributing to Munich satire magazine Simplicissimus, which was
committed to publishing visual and literary work critiquing economic
inequality.
She
also designed propaganda that addressed working-class issues. Her
1906 poster for the Exhibition of German Cottage Industries,
showing an exhausted working woman, was so distasteful to Empress Augusta
Victoria that she refused to visit. Another for the Greater Berlin
Administration Union, which denounced the city’s housing shortage,
was banned by an association of landlords.
Käthe
Kollwitz, “Battlefield” (1907), sheet 6 of the cycle Peasants’ War. (Wikimedia
Commons)
After
the assassination of Spartacus League leaders Karl Liebknecht and
Rosa Luxemburg by the Freikorps in 1919, Kollwitz attended Liebknecht’s funeral
with thousands of supporters and became sympathetic to the Communist Party of
Germany (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, or KPD). Her memorial to
Liebknecht is one of the results of that experience. It shows his pale corpse
lying flat in the style of a Christian lamentation, surrounded by black-clad
mourners. His side profile appears to glow, emanating bright streaks into the
coat of a sobbing man who seems not to notice.
Radical Motherhood
In
1913, Kollwitz cofounded the Organization of Women Artists, coinciding
with her foray into sculpture. One year later, and just three months into World
War I, her son Peter was killed in action. This sent the artist, who spoke with
so many ailing mothers, into a deep melancholy that informed the remainder of
her career. While working in a cafeteria for the unemployed, she experienced a
long period of creative stagnation that lasted until the revolution.
As
poet Richard Dehmel urged further action in the war,
Kollwitz published a dissenting letter in the German press that
quoted Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “Seeds for sowing should not be ground.”
Following armistice, her woodcut series The War (1918–1923)
provided a searing critique of the conflict’s effects on family life. One
sheet, simply titled “The Mothers,” shows a group of women holding each other
as one. This piece, which looks almost sculptural, became the archetype for her
many sculptures of mothers protecting children, and an enlarged version
is prominently displayed at the Central Memorial of the Federal
Republic of Germany to the Victims of War and Tyranny in Berlin.
Käthe
Kollwitz, “The Mothers” (1921-22), sheet 6 of the series The War. Woodcut.
(Wikimedia Commons)
The
peak of Kollwitz’s career came in 1927 with recognition by the Weimar Republic.
She visited the Soviet Union with Karl to commemorate ten years since the
October Revolution and became the head of the Master Studio for Graphic Arts at
the Prussian Academy, but her tenure was short-lived. When the National
Socialists came to power, Kollwitz signed an appeal with Karl,
Heinrich Mann, Albert Einstein, and other intellectuals to align the SPD
and KPD against the National Socialists, followed by a second attempt led
primarily by Mann and Kollwitz in 1933.
Coverage
in a Moscow newspaper led the Gestapo to question Kollwitz and threaten
imprisonment, and eventually led to the removal of her work from German museums
and her forced resignation from the academy. The Nazis stored her art in the
basement of the Crown Prince’s Palace throughout World War II, claiming that
“mothers have no need to defend their children. The State does that.”
A Clear Political Message
Some
critics have argued that Kollwitz’s work was not political because she never
portrayed the oppressor. Others have alleged that her style was “out of touch”
during the birth of abstract expressionism. For Louis Marchesano, this notion
is a result of the “aesthetic purification” that took place during the Cold War
in North American and West German cultural institutions.
Käthe
Kollwitz, “In Memoriam Karl Liebknecht” (1920). Woodcut. (Wikimedia Commons)
But
Kollwitz’s art, grounded in her radical commitments, and with its
representations of working-class history, was deeply political. She aligned
herself with many of the largest democratic and anti-war organizations. She was
a member of the communist-led Women’s International League for Peace and
Freedom as well as the Workers’ International Relief. She designed
posters for the International Labour Union, and her “Never Again
War” illustration for the Central German Convention of Young
Socialist Workers became an icon of the anti-war movement after her death.
Kollwitz
embraced negative space, wielding shadow to define her scenes before
expressionist filmmakers popularized this aesthetic. The darkness of
daily life took its toll on her, but optimism persisted. This is evident in one
of her last letters, to her daughter-in-law Ottilie, in 1944:
Every
war is answered by a new war, until everything, everything is smashed. The
devil only knows what the world, what Germany will look like then. That is why
I am whole-heartedly for a radical end to this madness, and why my only hope is
in a world socialism.
Billy
Anania is an art critic, editor, and journalist in New York
City.
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Source URL: https://portside.org/2021-12-19/radical-printmaking-kathe-kollwitz
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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