“I felt that I have no right to withdraw
from the responsibility of being an
advocate. It is my duty to voice the
sufferings of men, the never-ending
sufferings heaped mountain high.”

 

Those words sum up the mission of an extraordinary artist, whose talent could have been used to celebrate the simple joys of existence, but suffering and mourning became her mantra, and there was no better interpreter.

 

 

Kathe Kollwitz is a name to remember. Lucky for visitors, the Museum of Modern Art has finally chosen to put its gaze on her artworks. Born in the Prussian city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia) in 1867, Kollwitz established herself in an art world dominated by men by developing an aesthetic vision centered on women and the working class.

Early on, the neophyte artist was exposed to progressive principles of social equality through her parents. After studies in women’s art schools in Berlin and Munich, she produced her first prints. It is almost disconcerting in this chronological exhibition to discover such mastery on display in a young artist. Her earliest self-portraits are uncompromising. Unfettered by gendered expectations of beauty, her Self Portrait from 1893 shows a perfectly delineated exercise in contrast. Decades later, she will be just as uncompromising in revealing the ravages of time to her face. (Small Self-Portrait (1919).  The question of ego never seems prevalent (or even relevant) to the artist’s aim. Her use of self as subject was more a grasp at what was readily at hand. 

 

 

An early work of unabashed beauty is Female Nude, from Behind, on Green Cloth (1903), a crayon and brush lithograph with scraping needle. A Paris sojourn led to direct Influences by Edgar Degas, who made a tradition of depicting women’s nude torsos from behind. By then, French advances in lithography may have contributed to the luminous color she achieved. But color was soon abandoned, which Kollwitz believed  incompatible to the social subject matter she would wholly embrace.

After her marriage to Karl Kollwitz, a medical doctor, she moved to Berlin, giving birth to sons Hans and Peter. Such a marriage was a way to experience firsthand the rampant ailments of women in her working-class neighborhood. Her compassion was further heightened when her 16-year-old son contracted diphtheria. 

 

 

By the age of 31, her prints were nominated for a gold medal by the state, but Kaiser Wilhelm II vetoed the award because of socialist content and her gender. Later, when her son Peter was killed in World War I shortly after enlisting, the visceral intertwining of figures in her work becomes even clearer. In the case of The Widow, from War (1921), we see the anguish of a solitary woman, when countless men and boys were taken as human fodder for the war machine. Understandably, Kollwitz became an ardent pacifist.

Mortality is an indisputable fact of life, which Kollwitz faced head on. Death, Plate 2, is a harrowing vision of a mother turned away from the sight of her baby, highlighted as a wide-eyed corpse in the background of the humble table setting. Woman with Dead Child (1903) is a series with the power to evoke the unremitting reality of loss.  And what is more primal than a mother’s sorrow?  The immediacy is evident in the hunched grasp, hugging the boy’s head to her own in a tightening embrace. The artist wasn’t averse to using her own 7-year-old son Peter, cradling him with her own naked body in front of a mirror.

 

 

Such maternal grief had a historical precedent as well, with many children not living past the age of 5, poverty and pestilence an ever-present fact.

Socialist movements were the order of the day in 19th-century Germany. Rapid industrialization was replacing an agrarian economy at the common man and woman’s peril. Kollwitz responded. The Prisoners from Peasants’ War (1908) is a strong evocation among many. Here, the power is in the massed lineup of bodies, a hopeless huddle of humanity not unlike the soul-wrenching images of Auschwitz captives at the end of WWII. 

 

 

Always finding her meaning as the people’s interpreter, her “Black Anna” series was a perfect symbol for the artist to latch on to. Anna was the heroine of a 16^th-century uprising, such female embodiments of heroism rare enough. The textured layers give a full-bodied look, achieved by Kollwitz’s pressing down of fabrics and stippled papers into the etching plate.

Charcoal was for Kollwitz a simple fallback tool for creating boldness and strength in her images, self-evident in Home Worker, Asleep at the Table (1909) and Infant in the Lap of the Mother from 1903.

 

 

Another example of the simple application of tools is black charcoal crayon, to produce a masterful drawing such as Love Scene (1909-10). This is part of a series of erotic works that were never exhibited in her lifetime. Kollwitz was involved in an extramarital affair, but a woman would never release such artworks to the public eye during that time. 

Sculpture became just another means of exhibiting her brilliant execution. Mother with Child over Her Shoulder (1917) gives volume to the tenderness at play. In the last room of the exhibit, one of few plaster castings that survived WWII, is the silver-painted memorial to her artist friend Ernest Barlach, who died after relentless persecution by the Nazis. She uses her own face, with hands covering her mouth and one eye, to portray grief.

 

 

However, there were promising notes following a world at war. Democracy was on the horizon. Kollwitz became a professor at the Prussian Academy of Arts. It wasn’t until 1932 that she signed a petition encouraging the political left to unify against the Nazi Party and within a year, she was forced to resign. Threats of concentration camp imprisonment grew to a fever pitch. Two weeks before the end of WWII, she died in exile in Maritzburg, Germany. 

When a nation is under siege, either by its leaders or its pretenders to the throne, confusion and chaos can reign. It need not always be a physical toll, but certainly a psychological and emotional one. Art’s role in portraying the human cost becomes more important than ever. Kathe Kollwitz was the artist to do just that, and she succeeded for all time.

 

Author Bio:

Sandra Bertrand is Highbrow Magazine’s chief art critic.

 

For Highbrow Magazine

 

Photo Credits: Sandra Bertrand