GC Open #52
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Käthe Kollwitz (German pronunciation: [kɛːtə kɔlvɪt͡s] born as Schmidt; 8 July 1867 – 22 April 1945) was a German artist who worked with painting, printmaking (including etching, lithography and woodcuts) and sculpture. Her most famous art cycles, including The Weavers and The Peasant War, depict the effects of poverty, hunger and war on the working class. Despite the realism of her early works, her art is now more closely associated with Expressionism. Kollwitz was the first woman not only to be elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts but also to receive honorary professor status.
Life and work
Youth
Kollwitz was born in Königsberg, Prussia, as the fifth child in her family. Her father, Karl Schmidt, was a Social Democrat who became a mason and house builder. Her mother, Katherina Schmidt, was the daughter of Julius Rupp, a Lutheran pastor who was expelled from the official Evangelical State Church and founded an independent congregation. Her education and her art were greatly influenced by her grandfather's lessons in religion and socialism. Her older brother Conrad became a prominent economist of the SPD.
Recognizing her talent, Kollwitz's father arranged for her to begin lessons in drawing and copying plaster casts on 14 August 1879 when she was twelve. In 1885-6 she began her formal study of art under the direction of Karl Stauffer-Bern, a friend of the artist Max Klinger, at the School for Women Artists in Berlin. At sixteen she began working with subjects associated with the Realism movement, making drawings of working people, sailors and peasants she saw in her father's offices. The etchings of Klinger, their technique and social concerns, were an inspiration to Kollwitz.
In 1888/89, she studied painting with Ludwig Herterich in Munich, where she realized her strength was not as a painter, but a draughtsman. When she was seventeen, her brother Konrad introduced her to Karl Kollwitz, a medical student. Thereafter, Kathe became engaged to Karl, while she was studying art in Munich. In 1890, she returned to Königsberg, rented her first studio, and continued to depict the harsh labors of the working class. These subjects were an inspiration in her work for years.
In 1891, Kollwitz married Karl, who by this time was a doctor tending to the poor in Berlin. The couple moved into the large apartment that would be Kollwitz's home until it was destroyed in World War II. The proximity of her husband's practice proved invaluable:
Personal health
It is believed Kollwitz suffered anxiety during her childhood due to the death of her siblings, including the death of her younger brother, Benjamin. More recent research suggests that Kollwitz may have suffered from a childhood neurological disorder dysmetropsia (sometimes called Alice in Wonderland syndrome, due to its sensory hallucinations and migraines).
The Weavers
Between the births of her sons – Hans in 1892 and Peter in 1896 – Kollwitz saw a performance of Gerhart Hauptmann's The Weavers, which dramatized the oppression of the Silesian weavers in Langenbielau and their failed revolt in 1844. Kollwitz was inspired by the performance and ceased work on a series of etchings she had intended to illustrate Émile Zola's Germinal. She produced a cycle of six works on the weavers theme, three lithographs (Poverty, Death, and Conspiracy) and three etchings with aquatint and sandpaper (March of the Weavers, Riot, and The End). Not a literal illustration of the drama, nor an idealization of workers, the prints expressed the workers' misery, hope, courage, and eventually, doom.
The cycle was exhibited publicly in 1898 to wide acclaim. But when Adolph Menzel nominated her work for the gold medal of the Great Berlin Art Exhibition of 1898 in Berlin, Kaiser Wilhelm II withheld his approval, saying "I beg you gentlemen, a medal for a woman, that would really be going too far . . . orders and medals of honour belong on the breasts of worthy men." Nevertheless, The Weavers became Kollwitz' most widely acclaimed work.
Later life and World War II
In 1933, after the establishment of the National-Socialist regime, the Nazi Party authorities forced her to resign her place on the faculty of the Akademie der Künste following her support of the Dringender Appell. Her work was removed from museums. Although she was banned from exhibiting, one of her "mother and child" pieces was used by the Nazis for propaganda.
In July 1936, she and her husband were visited by the Gestapo, who threatened her with arrest and deportation to a Nazi concentration camp; they resolved to commit suicide if such a prospect became inevitable. However, Kollwitz was by now a figure of international note, and no further action was taken.
On her 70th birthday, she "received over 150 telegrams from leading personalities of the art world," as well as offers to house her in the United States, which she declined for fear of provoking reprisals against her family.
She outlived her husband (who died from an illness in 1940) and her grandson Peter, who died in action in World War II two years later.
She was evacuated from Berlin in 1943. Later that year, her house was bombed and many drawings, prints, and documents were lost. She moved first to Nordhausen, then to Moritzburg, a town near Dresden, where she lived her final months as a guest of Prince Ernst Heinrich of Saxony. Kollwitz died just 16 days before the end of the war. She was cremated and honoured with an Ehrengrab in Berlin's Friedrichsfelde Cemetery.
Legacy
Kollwitz made a total of 275 prints, in etching, woodcut and lithography. Virtually the only portraits she made during her life were images of herself, of which there are at least fifty. These self-portraits constitute a lifelong honest self-appraisal; "they are psychological milestones".
Dore Hoyer and what had been Mary Wigman's dance school created Dances for Käthe Kollwitz. The dance was performed in Dresden in 1946. Käthe Kollwitz is a subject within William T. Vollmann's Europe Central, a 2005 National Book Award winner for fiction. In the book, Vollmann describes the lives of those touched by the fighting and events surrounding World War II in Germany and the Soviet Union. Her chapter is entitled "Woman with Dead Child", after her sculpture of the same name.
An enlarged version of a similar Kollwitz sculpture, Mother with her Dead Son, was placed in 1993 at the center of Neue Wache in Berlin, which serves as a monument to "the Victims of War and Tyranny".
More than 40 German schools are named after Kollwitz. A statue of Kollwitz by Gustav Seitz was installed in Kollwitzplatz, Berlin in 1960 where it remains to this day.
Four museums, in Berlin, Cologne and Moritzburg, and the Käthe Kollwitz Museum in Koekelare are dedicated solely to her work. The Käthe Kollwitz Prize, established in 1960, is named after her.
In 1986, a DEFA film Käthe Kollwitz, about the artist was made with Jutta Wachowiak as Kollwitz.
In 2012, an exhibition of her work was curated for the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota by the art historian Corinna Kirsch.
Kollwitz is one of the 14 main characters of the series 14 - Diaries of the Great War in 2014. She is played by actress Christina Große.
In 2017, Google Doodle marked Kollwitz's 150th birthday.
An exhibition, Portrait of the Artist: Käthe Kollwitz was held at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England, from 13 September – 26 November 2017, and is intended to be shown subsequently in Salisbury, Swansea, Hull and London.
A retrospective exhibition of her work was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2024.
Source: Wikipedia
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