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The hair is wild, the face dark and fierce. A desperate, naked mother bends over her dead son and clings to him, as if absorbing him back into herself. When this etching was first exhibited in 1903 by the group of artists, the Berlin Secession, spectators were astounded. In its visceral depiction of suffering, Käthe Kollwitz’s “Frau mit Totem Kind” (“Woman with dead child”, painted) was unlike any previous depiction of the Virgin Mary holding the body of Christ in her arms.
Some art historians consider Kollwitz, who died in 1945, to be a virtuoso on a par with Dürer and Rembrandt. During his life his work was published in magazines and exhibited in galleries throughout the West, but has since been largely ignored. For most of the last century, “the critical establishment ignored him”, says Maria Gough, professor of modern art at Harvard University. Two major exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and the Städel Museum in Frankfurt aim to change this.
Critics in the past argued that Kollwitz was a “pessimistic painter of suffering”. It is true that his subjects were human figures trapped in the pain of war or poverty, but both exhibitions show that the artist was radical in both vision and medium. Like Charles Dickens, whose novels he read, he attempted to capture the pain of those left behind by a rapidly modernizing society and to depict life as “true and real and untainted” as possible. As he wrote in his diary in 1919: “Art can be a megaphone for those who cannot speak.”
She came to her senses early as the daughter of independent-minded parents in Königsberg (a German city that was ethnically cleansed by Soviet forces after World War II and is now part of Kaliningrad, Russia) Was. She was allowed to study art – hardly a common thing for a girl at that time – and she did so in Berlin, Paris and Florence. After marrying Kollwitz in 1891 and settling in Berlin, her star rose rapidly. In 1898 he exhibited his first cycle of engravings, “A Weaver’s Revolt”. The jury awarded her a gold medal, but Kaiser refused to give it, because “a medal for a woman, it would go too far”.
The controversy earned him a name, but just as his career began to flourish, World War I broke out (partly thanks to the same Kaiser’s exceptionally poor judgment). His youngest son was killed in the war. From that point on, Kollwitz’s art focused on the human costs of war: paintings of grief, narrative series of woodcuts and engravings and eventually sculptures, including one selected in 1993 by the German government for its national memorial to the victims of war. Pieta is also included.
Although Kollwitz was a member of the Secession, a group of artists who rejected academic tradition, she preferred the human figure and monochrome palette rather than the colorful abstractions that defined Modernism. Some modernists, who saw his paintings of real people, especially women, as somehow crude, dismissed him as a “social-democratic agitator”. Detractors focused on his subjects and biography rather than his singular talent.
According to Star Figura, curator of the MoMA exhibition, it is now time for Kollwitz to be recognized as “one of the most extraordinary draftspeople and printmakers in history.” He is a touchstone for many contemporary artists, including Kerry James Marshall, one of the most renowned painters today. On display at MoMA are successive “positions” or plates of each image, showing how Kollwitz expressed such emotional power.
Meanwhile the political posters he created during the Weimar period – including the most famous, “Nie Wieder Krieg” (“Never Again War”, pictured above) – had a long lasting influence on left-wing politics. Stadel shows that his social-realist style led to his work being co-opted by the communist East and rejected by the capitalist West during the Cold War.
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Kollwitz was forced to resign from teaching, his work sidelined by his censors as “degenerate art”. He died just as the Second World War was about to end. Decades later, his images of war and death remind audiences of the painful images that fill screens from conflicts around the world today. With one singular difference: in Kollwitz’s art, grieving people are treated with tenderness and empathy, and truly seen.
“Kollwitz” continues at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt until June 9; “Kath Kollwitz” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, through July 20.
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© 2023, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. From The Economist, published under license. Original content can be found at www.economist.com
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