Käthe Kollwitz
The artist of the poor and of mothers.
Käthe Kollwitz depicted poverty, war and grief in prints and sculpture. She lost a son in the First World War.
Käthe Kollwitz was born in 1867 in Königsberg in East Prussia, today Kaliningrad. She grew up in a family with strong social and religious ideals. As women were not allowed to study at the art academies, she trained at art schools for women in Berlin and Munich. In Berlin the artist Karl Stauffer-Bern became her teacher and advised her to concentrate on printmaking.
In 1891 she married the doctor Karl Kollwitz. They settled in a working-class district of north Berlin, where he had his practice for poor patients. Her subjects were drawn from those surroundings: workers, mothers, hunger and sickness.
Her breakthrough came with the print series A Weavers’ Revolt of 1893–1897, inspired by Gerhart Hauptmann’s play about an uprising among weavers. The Peasants’ War series followed later. She worked in etching, lithography and, from the 1920s, woodcut as well. The lines are powerful and the faces full of grief and anger, mostly in black and white.
In October 1914 her younger son Peter was killed in Flanders. The loss shaped the rest of her life. For many years she worked on a memorial, The Grieving Parents, completed in 1932 and today in a German war cemetery at Vladslo in Belgium. She also made the poster Never Again War of 1924. In 1919 she became the first woman elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts.
When the Nazis came to power in 1933 she was forced to leave the academy, and her works were removed from exhibitions. Her grandson Peter was killed in the Second World War in 1942. She died in April 1945, just a few weeks before the end of the war. Since 1993 an enlarged version of her sculpture Mother with her Dead Son has stood in the Neue Wache in Berlin, Germany’s central memorial to the victims of war and tyranny.