This is the catalogue to accompany the recent Käthe Kollwitz exhibition at the British Museum.
The two or three essays in the book include:
Käthe Kollwitz’s biography
Born Käthe Schmidt in 1867, left-wing upbringing, married a left-wing doctor (Karl Kollwitz) who practiced in the slums of Berlin, specialised in prints, devoted herself to left-wing subjects i.e. lives of the working poor, plus historic subjects e.g. a weavers’ rebellion, sent son off to the Great War and he was killed within weeks, decades of mourning and grief and obsession with death.
Detailed looks at Kollwitz’s major print series
- A Weavers Revolt (1898)
- The Peasants War (1902-8)
- War (1922-3)
- Death (1932-7)
A lifelong obsession with death
What comes over from the essays is Kollwitz’s obsession with death – possibly, as one essay suggests, as a result of the death of some of her siblings in infancy – definitely compounded by the poverty, sickness and death she saw all around her in the slums of Berlin.
She was unnaturally, morbidly attracted to the subject in the 1890s and 1900s, well before she made the fateful decision to help her beloved son Peter enlist into the army in the first weeks of the Great War, despite him being under age, only for him to be killed a matter of weeks later. The guilt must have been staggering.
From that point onwards, Death and the grief of mothers was to become her enduring subject.
The prints
The factual content of the book, then, is solid but not revelatory, and all the images are hedged around with an extreme of scholarly punctiliousness and accuracy. After all, this is a reference book for other scholars as much as an introduction to us lay people.
No, the reason for owning the book is not for the biography, detailed though it is – but for the quality of the reproductions, including close-ups of many of the key prints. These let you really savour the details, and make them even more powerful and moving.
Some of her images can be a bit clunky, some of the faces in the weaker pictures are less than persuasive, even though her figure drawing and composition are almost always powerful and commanding. But at her best, there’s a solid body of work of breath-taking power and depth which surely make Kollwitz one of the great artists of the twentieth century.
Self portrait 1912
Kollwitz did at least 50 self-portraits and no portraits of anyone else, hence the focus of the BM exhibition and of this book. They are no frills, no pretense records of a journey through a hard life and a gruelling era of history.
Self-portrait by Käthe Kollwitz (1912) © The Trustees of the British Museum
Woman with dead child (1903)
The most finished or prominent feature is the woman’s left knee and then, perhaps, her big left foot. This isn’t a dainty Rococo woman or an air-brushed sex object. This is a cave woman, Cro-Magnon Woman. No frills or make-up, no sexuality, just blunt primeval human feeling with extraordinary power.
Woman with Dead Child by Käthe Kollwitz (1903) © The Trustees of the British Museum
Unemployment (1909)
A large reproduction lets you see the fullness with which the baby and the children’s faces have been gently etched, and brings out the contrast between their soft child faces and the rest of the spare, scratchy, shadowy scene, the gaunt shadowed face of the exhausted mother.
Unemployment by Käthe Kollwitz (1909) © The Trustees of the British Museum
Arming in a vault (1906)
From 1789 to 1989, the great theme of European history – terror of uncontrolled, violent revolution from below.
Arming in a Vault by Käthe Kollwitz (1906) © The Trustees of the British Museum
Call of Death (1937)
Here I come, ready or not.
Call of Death by Käthe Kollwitz (1937) © The Trustees of the British Museum
This is the eighth and final image in Kollwitz’s final series of prints which was titled, simply, Death.
In fact it’s also a self-portrait as a glance at the 1912 self-portrait confirms – but now without hair, without any attributes which identify her gender. Just raw, elemental human.
In the Death series, completed before the Blitzkrieg and Stalingrad and Warsaw, before the Holocaust and the camps, it is as if Kollwitz has plumbed the depths of human experience, not in the relatively superficial terms of despair or emotion, but reaching far deeper down than that, to a grunting, primeval, prehistoric stratum of human experience.
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