Kollwitz, Käthe

Käthe Kollwitz: Self-Portrait with Hand on Forehead

Käthe Kollwitz, original name Käthe Schmidt, (born July 8, 1867, Königsberg, East Prussia [now Kaliningrad, Russia]—died April 22, 1945, near Dresden, Germany), German graphic artist and sculptor who was an eloquent advocate for victims of social injustice, war, and inhumanity.

The artist grew up in a liberal middle-class family and studied painting in Berlin (1884–85) and Munich (1888–89). Impressed by the prints of fellow artist Max Klinger, she devoted herself primarily to graphic art after 1890, producing etchings, lithographs, woodcuts, and drawings. In 1891 she married Karl Kollwitz, a doctor who opened a clinic in a working-class section of Berlin. There she gained firsthand insight into the miserable conditions of the urban poor.

Kollwitz’s first important works were two separate series of prints, respectively entitled Weavers’ Revolt (c. 1894–98) and Peasants’ War (1902–08). In those works she portrayed the plight of the poor and oppressed with the powerfully simplified, boldly accentuated forms that became her trademark. The death of her youngest son in battle in 1914 profoundly affected her, and she expressed her grief in another cycle of prints that treat the themes of a mother protecting her children and of a mother with a dead child. From 1924 to 1932 Kollwitz also worked on a granite monument for her son, which depicted her husband and herself as grieving parents. In 1932 it was erected as a memorial in a cemetery near Ypres, Belgium.

Kollwitz greeted the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the German revolution of 1918 with hope, but she eventually became disillusioned with Soviet communism. During the years of the Weimar Republic, she became the first woman to be elected a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts, where from 1928 to 1933 she was head of the Master Studio for Graphic Arts. Kollwitz continued to devote herself to socially effective, easily understood art. The Nazis’ rise to power in Germany in 1933 led to her forced resignation from the academy.

Kollwitz’s last great series of lithographs, Death (1934–36), treats that tragic theme with stark and monumental forms that convey a sense of drama. In 1940 her husband died, and in 1942 her grandson was killed in action during World War II. The bombing of Kollwitz’s home and studio in 1943 destroyed much of her life’s work. She died a few weeks before the end of the war in Europe.

Kollwitz was the last great practitioner of German Expressionism and is often considered to be the foremost artist of social protest in the 20th century. A museum dedicated to Kollwitz’s work opened in Cologne, Germany, in 1985, and a second museum opened in Berlin one year later. The Diary and Letters of Kaethe Kollwitz was published in 1988.