Kathe Kollwitz

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Käthe Kollwitz, née Schmidt (1867-45), a German artist who specialized in printing, printmaking, and woodcuts.

The effects of hunger, hunger, and war on the work class were depicted in her most popular art cycles, including The Weavers and The Peasant War.

Despite the realism of her early paintings, her art is now more closely associated with Expressionism.

Kollwitz was the first woman to not only be elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts but also be granted honorary professor status.

Life and work

Kollwitz was born in Königsberg, Prussia, as the fifth child in her family. Karl Schmidt, her father, was a social democrat who became a mason and house builder. Katherina Schmidt, a mother of Julius Rupp, a Lutheran pastor who was barred from the formal Evangelical State Church and established a non-denominational synagogue, was her mother. Her grandfather's religious and socialism experiences had a huge influence on her art and education.

When she was 12 years old, Kollwitz's father organized for her to learn drawing and copying plaster casts. She began her formal study of art under the direction of Karl Stauffer-Bern, a friend of artist Max Klinger, at Berlin's School of Women Artists. She began working with Realism-related subjects, including drawings of working people, sailors, and peasants she encountered in her father's offices at sixteen. Kollwitz was inspired by Klinger's etchings, both in terms of their process and social issues.

She studied painting with Ludwig Herterich in Munich, where she discovered that her forte was not as a painter but rather as a draughtsman. Konrad, her brother, introduced her to Karl Kollwitz, a medical student, when she was seventeen. Kathe became engaged to Karl while studying art in Munich later. In 1890, she returned to Königsberg, rented her first studio, and depicted the grueling labours of the working class. These subjects were a source of inspiration for years.

Kollwitz married Karl in 1891, who by this time was a doctor tending to the homeless in Berlin. The couple lived in the large apartment that would be Kollwitz's house until it was destroyed in World War II. Her husband's activities were extremely helpful: she was able to be near her husband's house; her husband's was able to travel: the proximity of her husband's activities was extremely helpful.

Kollwitz is said to have suffered with anxiety during her childhood due to the death of her siblings, including Benjamin's early death. According to more recent studies, Kollwitz may have suffered from a childhood mental disorder dysmetropsia (also known as Alice in Wonderland syndrome) due to its sensory hallucinations and migraines.

Kollwitz saw a performance of Hans in 1892 and Peter in 1896, which dramatized the oppression of the Silesian weavers in Langenbielau and their failed rebellion in 1844. Kollwitz was inspired by the performance and halted work on a line of etchings she had planned to represent Émile Zola's Germinal. She created a series of six works on the Weavers theme, three lithographs (Poverty, Death, and Conspiracy), and three etchings with aquatint and sandpaper (March of the Weavers, Riot). The prints were not a literal representation of the drama nor an idealization of employees, but they did represent the workers' misery, passion, and then doom.

In 1898, the cycle was on display in public for the first time. But when Adolph Menzel nominated her work for the gold medal of the Great Berlin Art Exhibition in 1898 in Berlin, Kaiser Wilhelm II withdrew his blessing, saying, "I beg you gentlemen, a medal for a woman," was not going too far. . ... On the breasts of deserving men, merit awards and trophies of honour have been given." Despite this, the Weavers became Kollwitz' most well-known piece.

The Peasant War was Kollwitz's second major cycle of works. Due to numerous preliminary drawings and abandoned theories of lithography, the culmination of this series spanned 1902 to 1908. In the early years of the Reformation, the German Peasants' War was a violent rebellion in Southern Germany. Peasants who had been branded slaves and the church were freed from arming feudal lords and the church in 1525. This body of work may have been influenced by a Hauptmann story, Florian Geyer, as similar to The Weavers. However, the first point of Kollwitz's fascination stemmed back to her youth, when she and her brother Konrad began to imagine themselves as barricade fighters in a revolt. Not only did Kollwitz have a childhood association, but also an artistic one. She was a spokesperson for those without a voice and liked to represent the working class in a manner no one else could comprehend. Black Anna, a woman who was portrayed as a protagonist in the revolt, was identified by the artist as a protagonist in the rebellion. The Peasant War, when completed, consisted of etchings, aquatints, and soft grounds: Plowing, Raped, Sharpening the Scythe, Arming in the Vault, Outbreak, The Prisoners, and After the War. A mother searching through bodies in the night, searching for her son, has been described as eerily premonitory. All in all, the works were more impressive than those of The Weavers, due to their greater size and striking command of light and shadow. They are Kollwitz's best achievements as an essist.

Kollwitz visited Paris twice while on Peasant War and enrolling in classes at Académie Julian in 1904 to learn how to sculpt. The Villa Romana prize was given to the etching Outbreak. In 1907 in a Florence studio, this award won a year's stay. Though Kollwitz did not do much during her stay in Florence, she later recalled the impact of early Renaissance art she encountered during her stay in Florence.

Kollwitz continued to exhibit her art after returning to Germany, but was captivated by younger compatriots. Kollwitz was inspired by expressionists and Bauhaus artists to simplify her expression. This new direction is shown by subordinate works such as Runover, 1910, and Self-Portrait, 1912. She also started working on sculpture.

In October 1914, Kollwitz's younger brother, Peter, was killed on the battlefield during World War I. The death of her child brought on a cycle of chronic depression in her life. By the time of 1914, she had made plans for a monument to Peter and his fallen comrades. She began destroying the monument in 1919 and rebuilt it in 1925. The Grieving Parents memorial, which was completed and erected in Roggevelde, Belgium, in 1932, was finally completed. The statues were later moved later in the day, when Peter's body was relocated to the nearby Vladslo German war cemetery.

Paul Cassirer's galleries hosted a retrospective exhibition of one hundred and fifty drawings by Kollwitz in 1917, on her 50th birthday.

Kollwitz, a devoted socialist and pacifist who was eventually attracted to communism, was aspired to communism. In her woodcut print, "memorial sheet for Karl Liebknecht" and her work with the Arbeitsrat for Kunst, a group of the Social Democratic Camp administration in the first few weeks after the war, she demonstrated her political and social sympathies. Kollwitz pleaded for old men and children to join the war as the war came to an end and a nationalistic call was made for old men and children to join the war, as Kollwitz wrote in a published statement:

When working on Karl Liebknecht's sheet, she discovered that etching was insufficient for conveying grand ideas. She completed the Liebknecht sheet in the new medium and made about 30 woodcuts by 1926 after seeing woodcuts by Ernst Barlach at the Secession exhibitions.

In 1919, Kollwitz was appointed professor at the Prussian Academy of Arts, becoming the first woman to hold that position. A regular income, a large studio, and a full professorship were all essential elements of membership. The Nazi government coerced her to resign from this position in 1933.

She was also appointed head of the Prussian Academy's Master Class for Graphic Arts in 1928. However, this position will be renamed shortly after the Nazi regime assumed power.

Her reaction to the war found an ongoing outlet in the years after World War I. She made the cycle War in woodcut form from 1922 to 23 years old, including The Sacrifice, The Volunteers, The Parents, The Widow I, The Mothers, and The People. Pro-war propaganda influenced a large portion of this artwork, which she and Otto Dix riffed on to produce anti-war propaganda. Kollwitz wanted to convey the horrors of being in a war to combat the growing pro-war sentiment in Germany. She produced three of Germany's Children Starving, Bread, and Never Again War posters in 1924.

Woman Letha, a young woman, is a writer who writes about death and dying in a smaller studio, Death from a Child, Life with a Woman, Death As a Mother, and The Call of Death.

In 1918, when Richard Dehmel called for more soldiers to fight in World War II, Kollwitz wrote an ode to the newspaper in which he stated that there will be no more war and that "seed corn must not be grounded" in reference to young soldiers who were killed in the war. In 1942, she made a piece by the same name, this time in reaction to World War II. The job reveals how a woman and arms cast over three young children is used to shield them.

The Nazi Party authorities coerced her to resign her position on the Akademie der Künste's faculty in 1933, after the establishment of the National Socialism regime. Her work was taken from museums. Although she had been barred from attending, one of her "mother and child" pieces was used by the Nazis for propaganda.

The Gestapo, who threatened her with arrest and transfer to a Nazi concentration camp in July 1936, visited her and her husband in July 1936; they resolved to commit suicide if such a possibility became inevitable. However, Kollwitz was still a figure of international concern, and no further action was taken.

"Over 150 telegrams from top artists of the art world," she said on her 70th birthday, as well as offers to house her in the United States, which she rejected due to fear of triggering reprisals against her family.

She outlived her husband (who died of an illness in 1940) and her grandson Peter, who died in combat in World War II two years later.

In 1943, she was evacuated from Berlin. Her house was bombed and many drawings, prints, and papers were destroyed later this year. She travelled first to Nordhausen and then to Moritzburg, a town near Dresden, where she spent her remaining months as a guest of Prince Ernst Heinrich of Saxony. Only 16 days before the war ended, Kollwitz died just 16 days before.

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