One of the most gifted and prolific artists of Germany was Käthe Kollwitz (1867 - 1945). A doctor's wife among the less privileged of society, she worked with her husband Karl in his practice. There she saw the suffering and pain of real people, and through her art she expressed what she saw and felt.
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She was born Käthe Schmidt, fifth child of a progressive family. Her father was a Social Democrat. Her pastor grandfather formed an independent congregation when he was kicked out of the Evangelical State Church. Lively intellectual discussions and radical socialist ideas such as workers' rights and equality of women influenced her learning.
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Her father recognized her creative talent early, and began her artistic training when she was still a child. At twelve she studiously drew and copied plaster casts. At sixteen, Käthe began to draw the working people, sailors and peasants who visited her father's office. In 1885 - 6 she studied under influential Swiss artist Karl Stauffer-Bern at the Academy of Women Artists in Berlin.
She met her husband Karl Kollwitz when she was seventeen. Her father sent her to Munich to study painting from 1888 - 9, hoping she would choose art over marriage.
Very few of her paintings remain. She decided her talents and desires were more suited to printmaking.
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In 1890 she opened an independent artist's studio, focused on the poor and working class as subject matter. When she and Karl became engaged, she made it clear to Karl her art came first.
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In 1891 they married, and Käthe worked with him in his doctor's practice in Berlin. His patients were members of the underprivileged classes. She washed their wounds, comforted the children and witnessed 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."
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Karl and Käthe had two sons. Hans was born in 1892 and Peter in 1896. In the early 1890s Käthe saw Gerhart Hauptmann's play, The Weavers, which dramatized the oppression of Silesian weavers and their failed 1844 revolt. Greatly inspired, she produced a series of expressive etchings and lithographs, creating some of her most powerful work.
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In 1904 she began sculpture classes in Paris. Meanwhile, her etchings received much attention. One in particular, Outbreak, won the Villa Romana prize. Established 1905, it's the oldest art prize in Germany. The award included a studio in Florence for a year. Like a sponge she absorbed the Italian artistic ambiance.
Her second major cycle of works was the Peasant War, from 1902 to 1908. A violent uprising in the sixteenth century, the German Peasants' War of Southern Germany happened in early years of the Reformation. Peasants in virtual slavery took up arms against feudal lords and the church. Kollwitz identified with Black Anna, one of the inciters of the revolution.
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A bold new art style, Expressionism, stormed through the country at the turn of the century and beyond. Considered an Expressionist by later scholars, Käthe Kollwitz was greatly influenced by the reactive, controversial work of artists like Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky in Munich and such artists as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Paula Modersohn-Becker in Berlin.
At the time, the term Expressionism didn't exist. It came years after the art style, coined by a journalist in 1916.
In 1914, the tragic death of her son Peter on the battlefield of the Great War plunged her into pain and overwhelming depression. Her art work cries with despair. For several years she worked on a memorial sculpture, called The Grieving Parents. It wasn't finished until 1932. She worked on it sporadically, beset by emotion, and destroyed it at least once to start over.
Meanwhile, in 1919 she became the first woman appointed as a professor at the Prussian Academy of Arts. She received regular income, a studio and full professorship. In 1933, the Nazi government forced her to resign.
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In 1924 she published her three most famous posters: Germany's Children Starving, Bread, and Never Again War. In 1928 she was named director of the Master Class for Graphic Arts at the Prussian Academy. She would lose this title too after the Nazis rose to power.
A human rights activist and pacifist, she demonstrated vocally and artistically against the Second World War. She had to tone it down when she was taken in for questioning by the rising powers.
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In the 1930s she completed 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 came for a visit. Käthe and her husband were threatened with arrest and deportation to a Nazi concentration camp. They both intended to commit suicide if it happened. By now, however, Käthe Kollwitz was internationally known and supported. The Gestapo took no further action.
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Karl Kollwitz succumbed to an illness in 1940. In 1942, Käthe's grandson Peter was killed in action in World War Two. In 1943 she was evacuated from Berlin. Her house was destroyed by bombs and much of her artwork lost. Although she previously received offers for sanctuary in other countries, she was afraid to leave Germany due to threats to her family.
She died at age 77, just sixteen days before the end of World War II. She created over 275 prints in etching, wood print and lithography. Of these she made over 50 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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