METAL ON METAL: Käthe Kollwitz, her Death works


Death grasps children

Käthe Kollwitz (1867 – 1945) was a German painter, printmaker, and sculptor whose work offered an eloquent and often searing account of the human condition, and the tragedy of war, in the first half of the 20th century. Her empathy for the less fortunate, expressed most famously through the graphic means of drawing, etching, lithography, and woodcut, embraced the victims of poverty, hunger, and war. Initially her work was grounded in Naturalism, and later took on Expressionistic qualities. In July 1936, she and her husband were visited by the Gestapo, who threatened her with arrest and deportation to a Nazi concentration camp; they resolved to commit suicide if such a prospect became inevitable. However, Kollwitz was by now a figure of international note, and no further action was taken. She outlived her husband (who died from an illness in 1940) and her grandson Peter, who died in action in World War II two years later. She was evacuated from Berlin in 1943. Later that year, her house was bombed and many drawings, prints, and documents were lost. Kollwitz died just before the end of the war. Kollwitz made a total of 275 prints, in etching, woodcut and lithography. In the mid-1930s she completed her last major cycle of lithographs, Death, which consisted of eight stones: Woman Welcoming Death, Death with Girl in Lap, Death Reaches for a Group of Children, Death Struggles with a Woman, Death on the Highway, Death as a Friend, Death in the Water, and The Call of Death.