Käthe Kollwitz's Empathy, Activism and Suffering
German artist Käthe Kollwitz lived through some of the most devastating decades in modern history. Her show at MoMA shares a lifetime of etchings, prints and drawings.
Käthe Kollwitz was born in 1867 to a family that valued progressive social equality, a cause she’d fight for her whole life through both her art and her action. She lived through the starving years of WWI in Berlin, which included the tragic death of her son Peter at the Belgian front. After the war, she became the first female professor at the Prussian Academy of Arts, and was subsequently forced into exile by the Nazis after narrowly escaping being sent to a concentration camp for her anti-fascist beliefs. She died two weeks before the end of WWII at the age of 77. Throughout her whole life, she used her unbelievable talent for etching, drawing and printmaking to try to push the needle in the right direction.
In a way that I must say feels very German, Kollwitz’s work and the MoMA show is all about suffering. This isn’t suffering in a noble, idealized sense, either: this is brutal animal anguish exposed through her exceptionally skilled drawings and etchings. There’s no effort to make the suffering more palatable through beautiful figures or appealing colors. In fact, she eliminated all color from her work after 1905 so as not to distract from the socially critical subject matter. The etching Uprising (1899) depicts Revolution, shown as an allegorical female nude, urging on a mass of peasants. With Kollwitz, Revolution is plain and unsexualized and her peasants frightening in their mob of anger. You can’t help but compare her depiction of Revolution with Eugène Delacroix’s colorful painting Liberty Leading the People (1830): the French artist showed Revolution as an appealing, partially-draped nude leading on a group of dashing revolutionaries, one of which has even managed to keep on his top hat. Kollwitz spent time in France studying art, which makes her rejection of the French sensibility that much more complete. She was only going to do things her way.
What is it with these German printmakers — why are they so good? In her choice of medium, mostly etching and woodblock prints, Kollwitz is part of a long line of German artists expertly combining the technical skill and gravitas of printmaking to create somber, striking, and politically-charged works. She feels unique in art history, though, because she’s not interested in shock value. Many artists of the era, like Otto Dix or Max Beckmann, were interested in the moment of horror, the bald, shocking event itself. Kollwitz isn’t. She’s interested in the aftermath. She’s interested in the way that people, mostly women, deal with the horrors of war, poverty, and sickness once it’s happened.
Kollwitz was memorializing female suffering even before the terrors of the world wars. Inspired by Michelangelo’s Pieta (1499), her Woman with Dead Child (1903) shows a desperate mother clutching the body of her son. She makes the woman look more like a creature than a human, a person turned bestial by unthinkable grief (and this was even before Kollwitz lost her own child). Her husband was a doctor, and through his female patients she saw the modern urban anguishes of Germany’s newly-industrial cities. She chose to engage with them rather than look away from the adversity: Unemployment (1909) depicts a mother lying exhausted in bed with three children, with a father staring fearful and wide-eyed into the distance. Much of the print is hazy except for the faces of the children. They are delicately drawn and shaded, full of life as they sleep, making the despair of their parents seem that much sharper.
Her persistent, unwavering depiction of these women is radical. These were poor women, the least important, nobody’s concern, and still she drew and etched them over and over and over. She made their suffering important. She put it on political posters, and she used printmaking partly because prints can be shared widely. She was determined to make people see what she saw. It’s an amazing reminder of one way in which artists are a social necessity. Art can show us society’s ills; it makes us confront things we could otherwise avoid. If her images weren’t impactful, the Nazis wouldn’t have needed to banish her. And they feel, sadly, just as urgent today. The devastation of two brutal new wars, one with a disproportionate effect on women and children, means Kollwitz’ works feel more like contemporary insights than historical records.
One of my favorite parts of the exhibition is the way it’s peppered with self portraits: you can watch Kollwitz change along with her work. My favorite is one at the beginning of the exhibition, showing a steely, determined young woman staring right at you. It’s detailed and realistic; a young artist showing off her skills. At the very end of the show there’s a smudgy, sketchy portrait of an older woman being touched by the hand of death, made towards the end of Kollwitz’s life. She’s matured, detailed depiction doesn’t matter to her anymore, and she leans towards the hand almost as if to welcome it.
There’s not not an element of heavy-handedness here — after a while, you might have to hold back a bleak smile at how consistently glum the titles are. “Woman with dead child on her knees, Death woman and child, Death seizes the children, Death seizes a woman, Woman and children going to their death” are just a few sample titles. There is only one topic here, but you can be damn sure Kollwitz is going to do it better than anyone. When you leave the exhibition, presumably at least a little weighed down with all these dead people, the first thing you see is an unbelievably placed Philip Guston painting titled Tomb. Nothing like a little macabre curatorial humor to round out a MoMA visit.