Käthe Kollwitz

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Profile Overview of Käthe Kollwitz

Käthe Kollwitz ( born 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. Her early work was realistic, but became freer in later years. Kollwitz was the first woman not only to be elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts but also to receive honorary professor status.

This profile of Käthe Kollwitz covers Early Life and Family Background, Personal health, The Weavers, Peasant War and Modernism and World War I.

Early Life and Family Background of Käthe Kollwitz

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 of Käthe Kollwitz

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's most widely acclaimed work.

Peasant War

Kollwitz's second major cycle of works was the Peasant War. The production of this series lasted from 1902 to 1908 due to many preliminary drawings and discarded ideas in lithography. It was inspired by the German Peasants' War of 1524–1525, when oppressed peasants in southern Germany took up arms against the nobility and the Church. As with The Weavers, this body of work may have been influenced by a Hauptmann play, Florian Geyer (1895). But the initial source of Kollwitz's interest dated to her youth when she and her brother Konrad playfully imagined themselves as barricade fighters in a revolution. Not only did Kollwitz have a childhood connection, but an artistic connection as well. She was an advocate for those without a voice and liked to portray the working class in a way no one else saw. The artist identified with the character of Black Anna, a woman cited as a protagonist in the uprising. When completed, the Peasant War consisted of seven etchings: Plowing, Raped, Sharpening the Scythe, Arming in the Vault, Charge, The Prisoners, and After the Battle. After the Battle is described as eerily premonitory as it features a mother searching for her son's body in the night. In all, the works were technically more impressive than those of The Weavers, owing to their greater size and dramatic command of light and shadow. They are Kollwitz's highest achievements as an etcher.

Kollwitz visited Paris twice while working on Peasant War and took classes at the Académie Julian in 1904 to learn to sculpt. The etching Outbreak was awarded the Villa Romana Prize. This prize provided a year's stay in 1907 in a studio in Florence. Although Kollwitz completed no work there, she later recalled the impact of early Renaissance art she experienced during her time in Florence.

Modernism and World War I

After her return to Germany, Kollwitz continued to exhibit her work but was impressed by younger compatriots. Expressionists and (after the First World War) Bauhaus artists inspired Kollwitz to simplify her means of expression. Subsequent works such as Runover, 1910, and Self-Portrait, 1912, show this new direction. She also continued to work on sculpture.

Kollwitz lost her younger son, Peter, on the battlefield in World War I in October 1914. The loss of her child began a stage of prolonged depression in her life. By the end of 1914 she had made drawings for a monument to Peter and his fallen comrades. She destroyed the monument in 1919 and began again in 1925. The memorial, titled The Grieving Parents, was finally completed and placed in the Belgian cemetery of Roggevelde in 1932. Later, when Peter's grave was moved to the nearby Vladslo German war cemetery, the statues were also moved.

In 1917, on her 50th birthday, the galleries of Paul Cassirer provided a retrospective exhibition of one hundred and fifty drawings by Kollwitz.

Source: adapted from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A4the_Kollwitz), text available under CC BY-SA 4.0.