Label Type
Cultural/Historical ContextLabel
Death, Woman, and Child (Tod, Frau, und Kind)
Käthe Kollwitz
Etching
In 1891 Käthe Kollwitz shared her studio space with her husband Karl, a doctor who tended to the poor in Berlin. Having seen the tragic fate of impoverished women and children first-hand and committed to social change, Kollwitz's works often depict illness and bereaved parents, and more universal themes of suffering, anguish, and death.
Kollwitz was strongly influenced by her friend, the artist Max Klinger (1857 – 1920), and his theoretical treatise, Malerei und Zeichnung outlining the role of the graphic arts in Germany. In his view painting had more in common with decoration, binding it to the natural world, whereas monochromatic drawing and prints were freed from that relationship. The scope of the “reporting” art of drawing can explore social issues and ideas without giving offense.
Carrie Kelb and Kathy Evans
I know that woman is you, Kathe Kollwitz, even if not exactly you. Your son lost during the first World War. This is who he will always be to you, and to all mothers who wrestle death for their children. Your face half the face of your boy, half a mouth, bone of your bone, eyes shut to the world, the breath of only one person heard. His fingers held like a small bunch of flowers, right hand hooked around his neck, an anchor to life. There is no longer the struggle, as if you might somehow win.
Doesn’t Death loom in the darkness and life in the light? Yet Death sets his face into the brightness, the sharp boney arm bisecting limp flesh in this suspended moment, where shadow is a shelter, a soundless space to dream against the cold light of day.
Kathy Evans, Visual Resources Librarian and Assistant to the Coordinator of Graduate StudiesLabel Type
Cultural/Historical ContextLabel
"In a period when recognition did not come easily to women, Kollwitz was, in 1919, the first woman elected to the Berlin Academy of Art. She was given the title of professor and the privilege of a free studio in the Academy building. In 1928 she was made director of the Masters’ Studio for Graphic Arts.
The wife of a physician who practiced in the Berlin slums, Kollwitz, too, was a protagonist for the poor and oppressed. Throughout her career, the artist directed her expressive efforts toward the vivid portrayal of the universal themes of death, suffering, and love. Kollwitz’s powerful graphic style and her particular interest in printmaking anticipated many of the concerns and methods of the younger expressionist generation, and represented a major break with the musty academic traditions of the nineteenth century
Over the years, her style developed from an earlier naturalism to a form of expressionism. There was a continuous tendency toward more and more abstract figures of greater emotional power. She wrote in her diary in 1909, “| must try to keep everything to a more and more abbreviated form. . . . l should like to do the new etchings so that all the essentials are strongly stressed and the in-essentials almost omitted.” Death and a Woman Struggling for a Child is one that manifests her desire for a more powerful economic treatment to make a vivid statement.
With the advent of the Third Reich, the artist’s work was classified as degenerate. She was forced to resign her position in the Berlin Academy, and galleries were forbidden to exhibit her work. Kollwitz died a few weeks before the close of World War ll.
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Label 2
As part of a politically progressive, middle-class family in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia), Käthe Schmidt was encouraged to draw and began art lessons when she was 14 years old. She attended The Berlin School of Art in 1884 and later went to study in Munich. After her marriage to Dr. Karl Kollwitz in 1891, the couple settled in Berlin, living in one of the poorest sections of the city. It was here that Kollwitz developed the strong social conscious that is so fiercely reflected in her work.
The linking of purpose with technique allowed the socially oriented topics motivated by the events of World War I, in which her younger son Peter was killed, and later the November Revolution and traumatic formation of the Weimar Republic, to be balanced by cosmic themes of maternity, parting, and death.
Kollwitz's art resounds with compassion as she makes appeals on behalf of the working poor, the suffering and the sick. Her work serves as an indictment of the social conditions in Germany during the late 19th and early 20th century.
Kollwitz understood graphic arts to be the most democratic of visual media, as it provided the widest distribution of original imagery at the lowest cost. A body of some 270 etchings, woodcuts, and lithographs, primarily in dramatic black and white, exhibit a style between naturalism and expressionism.
Kathe Kollwitz became the first woman elected to the Prussian Academy but because of her beliefs, and her art, she was expelled from the academy in 1933. Harassed by the Nazi regime, Kollwitz's home was bombed in 1943. She was forbidden to exhibit, and her art was classified as ""degenerate."" Despite these events, Kollwitz remained in Berlin unlike artists such as Max Beckman and George Grosz who fled the country.
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