Käthe Kollwitz (1867 - 1945) is a stellar German artist. A doctor's wife among the less privileged of society, she works with her husband Karl in his practice. There she sees the suffering and pain of real people, and through her art she expresses their plight.
She's born Käthe Schmidt, fifth child of a progressively thinking family. Her father is a Social Democrat. Her pastor grandfather forms a separate congregation when he's barred from the Evangelical State Church.
Lively intellectual discussions and radical socialist ideas such as workers' rights and equality of women influence her learning. Her father recognizes her creative talent early, and begins her artistic training when she's still a child.
At twelve she studiously draws and copies plaster casts. At sixteen, Käthe begins to draw the working people, sailors and peasants who visit her father's office. In 1885 - 6 she studies under influential Swiss artist Karl Stauffer-Bern at the Academy of Women Artists in Berlin.
She meets husband-to-be Karl Kollwitz when she's seventeen. Her father sends her to Munich to study painting 1888 - 9, hoping she will choose art over marriage. Very few of her paintings remain. She decides her talents and desires are suited to sculpture and printmaking.
In 1890 she opens an independent artist's studio, focused on the poor and working class as subject matter. When she and Karl become engaged, she makes it clear to Karl her art comes first.
In 1891 they marry, and Käthe works with him in his doctor's practice in Berlin. His patients are members of the underprivileged classes. She washes their wounds, comforts the children and witnesses first-hand their despair. She wrote:
"The motifs I was able to select from this milieu (the workers' lives) offered me, in a simple and forthright way, what I discovered to be beautiful.... People from the bourgeois sphere were altogether without appeal or interest. All middle-class life seemed pedantic to me. On the other hand, I felt the proletariat had guts. It was not until much later...when I got to know the women who would come to my husband for help, and incidentally also to me, that I was powerfully moved by the fate of the proletariat and everything connected with its way of life.... But what I would like to emphasize once more is that compassion and commiseration were at first of very little importance in attracting me to the representation of proletarian life; what mattered was simply that I found it beautiful."
Karl and Käthe have two sons. Hans is born in 1892 and Peter 1896. In the early 1890s Käthe sees Gerhart Hauptmann's play, The Weavers, which dramatizes the oppression of Silesian weavers and their failed 1844 revolt.
Greatly inspired, she produces a series of expressive etchings and lithographs, creating some of her most powerful work. Her second major cycle is the Peasant War, from 1902 to 1908.
A violent uprising in the 16th century, the German Peasants' War happens in early years of the Reformation. Peasants rise against feudal lords and the Church after Martin Luther challenges their authority.
Kollwitz identifies with Black Anna, one of the inciters of the revolution. Meanwhile, her prints start to get attention. She works in drypoint, etching and woodcut.
One work in particular, Outbreak (above), wins the Villa Romana prize. Established 1905, it's the oldest art prize in Germany. The award includes a studio in Florence for a year. Like a sponge she absorbs the Italian artistic ambiance.
Florence is the center of the Italian Renaissance and home to Michelangelo and other greats. The Uffizi, built by the Medici family, is originally a building of offices. In the 16th century it houses art and alchemy labs. By the time Käthe arrives, it's open to the public as a gallery.
Famous art patrons, the Medici have a wondrous collection including Donatello's sculpture David, work by Raphael, Caravaggio and other monstrous talents. She's highly influenced by the expression and sense of life in these pieces.
A bold new art style, Expressionism, storms through the country at the turn of the century and beyond. Considered an Expressionist by later scholars, Käthe is greatly impresse by the reactive, controversial work of artists like Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky in Munich.
Artists like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Paula Modersohn-Becker in Berlin also pique her interest. At the time, the term Expressionism doesn't exist. It comes years after the art style emerges, coined by a journalist in 1916.
In 1914, the tragic death of her son Peter on the battlefield of the Great War plunges her into pain and overwhelming depression. Her art work cries with despair. For years she labors on a memorial sculpture, The Grieving Parents. It isn't finished until 1932.
Her work on the sculpture is sporadic, beset by emotion. She destroys it at least once to start over.
Meanwhile, in 1919 she becomes the first woman appointed as a professor at the Prussian Academy of Arts. She receive regular income, a studio and full professorship. In 1933, the Nazi government forces her to resign.
In 1924 she publishes her three most famous posters: Germany's Children Starving, Bread, and Never Again War. In 1928 she's named director of the Master Class for Graphic Arts at the Prussian Academy. She would also lose this title after the Nazis rise to power.
A human rights activist and pacifist, she demonstrates vocally and artistically against the Second World War. She has to tone it down when she's brought for interrogation by the rising powers.
In the 1930s she completes her final major cycle of work, known as Death or the Death Cycle. The series of eight lithographs feature the appearance of Death in fearsome forms, taking children from their mother, peering over a shoulder with ominous finality.
In July 1936, the Gestapo come for a visit. Käthe and her husband are threatened with arrest and deportation to a Nazi concentration camp. They intend to commit suicide if it happens.
By now, however, Käthe Kollwitz is internationally known and supported. The Gestapo take no further action.
Karl Kollwitz succumbs to an illness in 1940. In 1942, Käthe's grandson Peter is killed in World War Two. In 1943 she's evacuated from Berlin. Her house is destroyed by bombs and much of her artwork lost.
Although she previously receives offers for sanctuary in other countries, she is afraid to leave Germany due to threats to her family.
Just sixteen days before the end of World War II, Käthe dies at age 77. She has created over 275 prints in etching, wood print and lithography. Of these 50 are self-portraits, a chronicle of her life. Käthe Kollwitz remains one of the greatest artists in Germany and the world today.
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