Käthe Kollwitz Gets Her Due

There's a show at NY's Museum of Modern Art for which I've been waiting for a long time. And I'm not the only one. An extensive show of the art of Käthe Kollwitz has been open for several weeks; it's definitely the first presentation of her work in a long time--possibly the first in the U.S.

I'd seen examples of her sculpture and drawings in various museums--a sculpture of a woman that I saw in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts some years ago has stuck with me ever since. She was a socialist, who sought social change, with great feeling. One of her two sons died in combat, which brought out her long-held pacifist leanings.  

Much of her work consists of drawings of women in parlous situations and stark titles like Woman With Dead Baby. She clearly felt strongly for people whose lives had been upended or just ended by war, oppression, and "the system". Drawings were her metier, along with sculpture. She lived in Germany and lived a long life, somehow making it through the awful last stretch, the 30's and 40's until her death in 1945. The Nazis burned many of her works but she almost outlived them.

She was dedicated to political change through socialism and sacrificed much of her family life to her politics--it did help that her husband managed to keep things afloat from his medical practice.

Her work is affecting, however, and this depth of feeling overwhelms the anger that impelled her to political activism. Her sculptures of women show this combination of realism and feeling. At times, politics dominated--with her posters redolent of the Weimar republic of the 20's. But the personal tragedies of her family, her friends, and her artistic colleagues and peers during these troubled times influenced and dominated her drawings and sculpture.

She had mastered the fundamentals of both arts so that she could readily convey her feelings through them. Her work attracts and then holds your attention. It is not sentimental nor mawkish. Instead, it confronts the awful truths of her times without any mediation. There's a German Expressionist show now at the National Gallery, which I've not yet seen: Kollwitz doesn't easily fit into any school or group, neither the Expressionists nor Der Blaue Reiter. She was her own person doing her own inimitable art conveying sorrow and strength of ordinary people--workers and mothers.