Mother with her dead son. de:User:SpreeTom at de.wikipedia Edited by Cornischong at lb.wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0 · resized · source

Kathe Kollwitz

Public domain1867-1945·German·printmaking·Wikipedia ↗

Who

German printmaker and sculptor, the first woman elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts (1919). Lost her younger son in Belgium in the first weeks of the First World War and a grandson in the Second.

Why they matter

Etching, lithography and woodcut, in that order, over fifty years, always about grief, hunger, labour and war, and never sentimental about any of it. The most widely owned serious printmaker of the twentieth century in Germany, because she priced her work so that workers could buy it.

What to buy

Originals: Kollwitz made large editions and the plates were reprinted after her death, so the market runs from a few hundred dollars for a posthumous impression to tens of thousands for signed lifetime proofs. The Knesebeck catalogue numbers and the printer's stamp tell you which you are looking at. Swann sells her regularly. Books: MoMA's 2024 retrospective catalogue is the current standard.

Notes

Public domain since 2016. Museums devoted to her exist in Cologne and Berlin.

Story

In 1937 the Nazi government removed her work from the Academy's exhibition and, in effect, banned her from showing; she had already been forced to resign her professorship in 1933 after signing an appeal for the left to unite against Hitler. Her prints were never included in the Degenerate Art exhibition, apparently because they were too popular to attack safely. The Gestapo visited in 1936 and threatened her with a concentration camp; she and her husband agreed to carry poison in case they were arrested. Her Berlin flat and much of her work were destroyed in a bombing raid in 1943. She was evacuated to Moritzburg, near Dresden, where she died in April 1945, sixteen days before the German surrender. Her enlarged sculpture Mother with her Dead Son has stood in the Neue Wache in Berlin, the national memorial to the victims of war and tyranny, since 1993.

Key works

A Weavers' Revolt (1893-1897) - cycle of six prints
Peasants' War (1902-1908) - cycle of seven etchings
Woman with Dead Child (1903) - etching
War (Krieg) (1921-1922) - cycle of seven woodcuts

Kathe Kollwitz

Who

Why they matter

What to buy

Notes

Story

Key works

In museum collections

See the work

Prints

Books

Originals

See also