Käthe Kollwitz’s Prints and Drawings Capture the Sorrow of Daily Life

Courtesy Käthe Kollwitz Museum, Berlin

“I want to be effective in this time in which people are so perplexed and in need of help.” Käthe Kollwitz wrote in her diary toward the end of 1922. She had just completed “War,” a series of seven woodcuts expressing what she saw as the deluded fervor and emotional scars of the recent European war. In 1920s Germany, that disaster, with its tragic consequences, was a subject on everyone’s mind.

Kollwitz saw suffering firsthand, not only in Berlin streets and demonstrations but in the medical practice of her husband, Karl. A sweeping exhibition of 120 of her prints, drawings, and sculptures opening at New York’s Museum of Modern Art on March 31 is the first ever museum retrospective for Kollwitz in New York, and her first major United States museum survey since a 1992 show at the National Gallery, which produced a substantial scholarly catalog. The MoMA show comes at a time when we are once again witnesses to war and violence amid an air of despair and helplessness. Focusing on emotional responses rather than specific events, Kollwitz’s work elicits a universalizing empathy that feels relevant in our own time, when factual specificity is so hard to come by, and so hard to bear.

Primarily a printmaker, Kollwitz (1867– 1945), when she created “War,” was already renowned for her etchings and lithographs, but had lately turned to a medium that, in its roughly chiseled lines and stark contrasts, better fulfilled her need for directness. Just one year earlier, Otto Dix had published his portfolio of 50 wrenching intaglios titled “The War,” chronicling his experience fighting in the trenches. Yet unlike Dix, who embraced the unpredictable possibilities of etching, Kollwitz had always been finicky with that medium. Consequently, it had become, for her, too slow, too technical. Among other factors, her desire for a more direct expression was fueled by the death of the younger of her two sons, Peter, who was killed in Flanders shortly after he enlisted in 1914. Suddenly, she found herself in the company of the German millions who were grieving similar losses, “people perplexed and in need of help.”

Woodcut, that most German of mediums, figured prominently in the work of many of Kollwitz’s contemporaries. Indeed, the woodcuts of her friend, the intensely spiritual sculptor Ernst Barlach, were a major impetus in her taking up the medium. But she had little interest in the technique’s nationalistic overtones. There was great irony inherent in the Expressionists’ embrace of German artistic traditions. Their jingoism was thoroughly quashed, first by the war, which killed some and drove others literally mad, and later by Nazism, which swept them into the bin of “degenerate” art.

Kollwitz would not entirely escape this latter fate. Condemned as “degenerate,” she was forced to resign from the Prussian Academy in 1933, and her works were removed from museums; in 1936 the Nazis threatened to imprison both her and Karl. She nonetheless remained in Germany until her death in 1945, protected at the end by patrons in and near Dresden.

It was a 1919 funerary portrait of sorts that inspired her to take up the chisel. The woodcut In Memoriam Karl Liebknecht is a tribute to the Communist leader who, along with Rosa Luxemburg, was murdered by the right-wing paramilitary Freikorps. Although she was no Communist, Kollwitz, like many left-leaning Germans, was horrified. She was invited by the family to draw Liebknecht on his deathbed (one such rare drawing, in charcoal, is in the MoMA show), and used her sketches as the basis for a finished print.

The resulting woodcut is an image of workers come to mourn their fallen leader. Heads bowed, faces mournful, they comprise the top three-quarters of the composition, while Liebknecht is consigned to the very bottom, his head the same size as the gnarled hand of one worker who tenderly touches the displayed corpse. Here, as so often with Kollwitz, the subject is those left behind. The event that caused their despair is not made explicit. Instead, we are left with the sense of collective loss that has come in its wake.

A similar focus can be seen in “War.” A stirring call to battle is shown in all its perversity in the first plate, The Volunteers, where the open crying mouths and distorted faces of young men, led into battle by a death’s-head, might be read as either enthusiasm or horror. Kollwitz’s own son had enlisted with such misguided nationalism, having obtained his father’s reluctant permission through the intervention of Käthe, a decision she regretted for the rest of her life. In the print, jagged spikes hover above the heads of the enlistees. The deep sockets of their eyes and their hollow cheeks echo those of the skull leading them.

Such pairing of death and youth had been present in German prints from their earliest times. In a 15th-century drypoint by the Master of the Housebook, for instance, a foppish youth and a decaying corpse confront each other in identical poses. In this and innumerable examples, death is shown to be always present, ready to take the young and old alike. Death, Woman and Child, Kollwitz’s etching from 1910–11, shows the dreaded trio close-up, cheek-to-cheek, in a long-standing printed tradition of the living vying with death in a losing struggle. In a 1934 lithograph, Death Grabbing at a Group of Children, the dreaded skeleton flies into the crowd, his cape soaring upward.

For Kollwitz, grieving parents bear the heaviest load. Five of the seven prints in “War” consider a bereft parenthood. The most personal is The Parents, in which a couple on their knees embraces within heavy drapery, an abstracted mound of grief. The outsize knobby hands of the father, one covering his face, the other sheltering his wife, are worker’s hands that carry the marks of toil and loss. It is a composition Kollwitz would repeat in both graphics and sculpture.

Kollwitz’s heartrending images of grieving mothers predate her own loss. In a large group of prints and drawings she created around 1903, a naked monumental woman cradles her child in her arms. One of Kollwitz’s friends was actually alarmed when she saw a lithographic version, afraid that something had happened to Peter, the model for the child, who was still a young boy. More than a dozen of these 1903 prints and drawings are in the MoMA show, which also chronicles how Kollwitz continued to explore the theme for many years in all mediums.

In one of her very last prints—a lithograph, since woodcut, it turned out, would be but an interlude—we see a woman sheltering a group of children. Its title, Seed for the Planting Must Not Be Ground, was based on a quotation from one of her literary heroes, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. She lived its message and repeated it in her artwork and writings. That same year, in 1942, her eldest grandson, also named Peter, was killed at the Russian front. By then, she had witnessed the waste of young lives for more than a generation.

KOLLWITZ WAS WIDELY ESTEEMED from the time of her earliest successes, in the late 1890s, and it may well have been her fame that later protected her from the Nazis. Born Käthe Schmidt in Königsberg, in eastern Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia), she was the child of an affluent mason. Her maternal grandfather, the cleric Julius Rupp, was the popular founder of a dissident Protestant congregation. Well versed in religion and philosophy, she was the beloved child of liberal parents who encouraged her career as an artist. She studied art from age 14 onward, in Königsberg and Munich, and in Berlin at the School for Women Artists, where she eventually taught printmaking.

Early on committed to graphic arts, she worked mainly in black and white, and was influenced by the prints and writings of the German Symbolist artist Max Klinger. Engaged to Karl Kollwitz at age 19, she married him in 1891; Karl established his medical practice in Berlin, in the working-class neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg, on a street today named for Käthe. She was like so many contemporary artists who chafed against bourgeois culture and always preferred to represent proletarians—not so much, as she later asserted in her diary, out of political considerations, but aesthetic ones: she simply found workers to be more “beautiful.”

In her 30s, she became something of a cause célèbre after producing a series of prints, “A Weaver’s Revolt,” that became unintentionally controversial. Moved by an 1893 performance of The Weavers, a play by Gerhart Hauptmann about a failed 1844 revolt by Silesian weavers protesting the mechanization of their craft, she created her own account of events. The series, intended at first as a cycle of etchings, but eventually published in 1897 as three lithographs and three etchings, was exhibited in 1898 at the Greater Berlin Art Exposition, where it was awarded a gold medal that Kaiser Wilhelm II immediately rescinded.

The Emperor’s ostensible reason for this veto was that such an award should not be given to a woman. But he also considered the entire series, with its subversive focus on the workers’ plight, to be “gutter” art. Later, in 1906, his wife insisted that Kollwitz’s posters for a German Cottage Industry exhibition, illustrating a weary female home worker, be removed before she would set foot in the show.

Setting her weavers’ revolt in the present, Kollwitz presented a series of six scenes demonstrating violence as the outcome of deprivation. In the first, a desperate woman mourns the passing of her child, seen pale and tiny in a bed in the foreground, as idled looms recede into shadowy depths. The mother herself is the next victim, slumped against a wall, in the company of her husband and another child, who stares in mute horror as death reaches its skeletal arm across to touch the woman. In the third sheet, a small group of men conspire in a lantern-lit interior, followed by images of workers marching, then storming, the mill owner’s gate. In the final print, End, the bodies of slain victims return home, laid to rest under a loom as a pale woman dressed in black stands deathlike over the scene.

That woman, with her long, narrow face and large hands, is a character that recurs in Kollwitz’s oeuvre. She is the wife or mother left behind to contend with her sorrow. This final sheet, in etching and aquatint, sandpaper and burnish, demonstrates the controlled experimentation that characterizes Kollwitz’s intaglios. With its deep blacks and textured surfaces, it presents a mastery of the medium she had struggled to bring to this point. The narrative is straightforward: the artist freed herself of an allegorical fussiness reminiscent of Klinger and the Symbolist tradition, as the scholar Annette Seeler has noted. While there is something timeless about the female figure, she is inextricable from the narrative at hand and essential to rooting the story in the here and now of events.

KOLLWITZ’S NEXT ETCHING CYCLE, “Peasants’ War” (1901–08), is arguably her greatest in any medium. Once again, she turned to events of the past, in this case an uprising by German peasants in 1524–25, viewed by the socialists as a major precedent for then current unrest. The first image that Kollwitz worked on was Charge, in which a heroine named Black Anna, her back to the viewer, raises her arms to spur the armed peasants, who rush headlong in a raking diagonal. In some earlier versions of this print, which Kollwitz reworked many times, the female figure is depicted as a nude flying through the air above, but Kollwitz rejected this allegorizing type in the final piece, where she is decidedly earthbound, a female presence uncharacteristically active in the melee. The peasants seem to materialize out of the very hills behind them, in a manner reminiscent of Goya’s Disasters of War, where humanmade horrors melt into a barren unforgiving landscape. It is an extraordinary print, one of the greatest in German art.

Throughout the series, Kollwitz provided texture with an unconventional blend of techniques, deploying a skillful combination of more traditional processes—line etching, drypoint, aquatint, and reservage (the last somewhat akin to sugar lift)—alongside experimental ones, like pressing rough cloth into a soft ground surface, visible in the prints in a faint grid. In plate 1, The Ploughmen, two dehumanized figures yoked to a plow furrow the soil, seemingly made of the same substance as them; in Plate 2, Raped, a faceless woman with splayed legs melts into the wreckage of a garden plot as, in the upper left, a child looks on. With these two prints, we are given reason for the peasants’ rage, introduced by another woman seen close-up, her eyes closed as she determinedly sharpens a scythe (Plate 3). In a darkened vault, the peasants seize arms (Plate 4); in Charge (Plate 5), they revolt.

The final print, Battlefield, shows the aftermath of this failed uprising. In a dark field, at night, a bent woman carrying a lantern discovers her dead son, reaching for him with a gnarled hand, Kollwitz’s everpresent trope for the worker. The shadowy dead lie about, again echoing Goya. This print is especially spooky, given her son Peter’s death in the killing fields of Flanders less than a decade after its completion.

Loss always seems inevitable for Kollwitz. But while most of her works depict grief, “Peasants’ War” argues for active resistance, even when the odds are stacked terribly. Mostly, she suggests, it is in the witnessing of events—in seeing the evidence—that our consciousness, as well as our eyes, are opened.

Kollwitz was no revolutionary, however. In “Peasants’ War,” she represents a political cause as fraught with failure. She herself always resisted joining a specific movement. “I am horrified and shaken by all the hatred in the world,” she wrote in 1920. “I long for the kind of socialism that lets people live, and find that the earth has seen enough of murder, lies, misery, distortion.”

This is not to say, however, that she did not avow specific causes—most often those demanding redress for the exploitation of women, who were the true cause. A 2015 exhibition of her work, “Käthe Kollwitz and the Women of War: Femininity, Identity, and Art in Germany during World Wars I and II,” at both the Davis Museum at Wellesley College and the Smith College Museum of Art, made this argument. It showed how, long before she lost her son, Kollwitz had witnessed the toll of poverty on the women seen so often in her husband’s office. The artist shows such women, weary and patient, revealing their strength in myriad details. And she was clearly angry. Her Poster against Paragraph 218 (1923), for example, protests a law prohibiting abortion—an image, again, that resonates uncannily with our own times. Plus ça change …

Her son’s death drove her artistic mission from WWI on. From the time he was killed, Kollwitz intended to memorialize him in sculpture. Eventually she did, in The Grieving Parents, installed in 1932 at the Roggeveld Military Cemetery in Belgium, where Peter was buried. The cemetery, including Peter’s grave, was relocated to the Vladslo-Praetbos Military Cemetery, near Diksmuide, which now contains Germans killed in both wars. There, we see the kneeling couple, the mother with a bowed head and the father staring stoically ahead. Kollwitz originally intended a sculpture of Peter to be placed between them on a raised slab, but eventually, she removed him and situated the parents with their backs toward the entrance of the cemetery, facing the graves of all the fallen. Enacting a kind of sculptural sacrifice, she honored a larger purpose.

Death comes for Kollwitz herself in the last of her series, “Death,” eight lithographs begun in the 1920s and completed between 1934 and 1937. The final sheet shows a hand reaching for the artist. With a bleak expression, she appears resigned. Her own left hand shows the index finger extended, not unlike the gesture of Adam in the Sistine Chapel.

Kollwitz made some 100 self-portraits over the course of her lifetime, and the MoMA exhibition includes many of them. Most are full-face depictions, with Kollwitz staring directly out at the viewer—and at herself. The earliest drawings in the show were made when she was in her 20s, the latest an unforgiving profile in charcoal, around age 70. Among the loveliest images is a 1904 lithograph from the museum’s own collection, which presents some rare color. Tragedy has not yet struck, but gazing slightly downward, Kollwitz looks profoundly sad.

A lifelong melancholy was fed as much by some inner passion as by external events; in these images, she seldom smiles. Instead, the artist portrays herself as the ultimate observer, of both herself and the world. One can only guess how disappointed she might have been to witness the unfolding of today’s unfortunate repetitions.