mood.
Käthe Kollwitz used the younger of her two sons, Peter, as a model. She held him for hours while working on the 1903 etching Woman with Dead Child , and when she complained of exhaustion, he said, ‘Don’t worry, Mother, it will be very beautiful.’ Hans, the elder boy, was more difficult: moody yet
imaginative. She thought that Hans was like her and she found Peter easier. While not demonstrative, she spoke freely to her children and, in this time of Freud, talked about sexual feelings and early love, far beyond what had been discussed during her own Königsberg childhood.
Her reputation grew with her technical skill in etching, drawing, lithograph and aquatint. On two trips to Paris, the art capital of the world, without Karl and the children, she met Rodin, visited museums, cafés and galleries and found the dance halls of Montmartre quite different to Rupp or Schmidt austerity or to industrial Berlin. Prenzlauerberg could give rise to a feeling of entrapment, with everyone dependent on her, but Käthe Kollwitz’s art was rooted irretrievably there or in her north-eastern origins – not in the bright colours and blurred boundaries between abstraction and realism that she found in Paris. In 1908 she followed the Weavers cycle with The Peasants’ War , inspired by a sixteenth-century revolution, where scenes of unforgiving darkness show human beings in beast-like conditions. Black Anna, leader of the revolutionaries, seems to lead her forces out of the earth in a great wave, doom and death etched into their raw, skull-like faces. Only the victims are shown, not the perpetrators of injustice. Battlefield has a peasant finding her dead son – for which the child Peter modelled, his mother weeping as she drew him.
It is a dark view. In Carmagnole , inspired by Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities , French revolutionaries dance against what looks like the tall, dense buildings of medieval Königsberg; Woman with Dead Child has its black and white heightened with gold wash, the mother apparently devouring her child; in 1903 Hans had nearly died of diphtheria. Female Nude from the Back of 1903 is one of her few uses of colour, the green shawl an unashamedly aesthetic touch.
Käthe Kollwitz’s diary has glimpses of the remembered Paris of 1904 and 1907, of a later love affair with the Jewish Viennese publisher Hugo Heller and of her secret erotic drawings inspired
by this. More freedom came through her winning of the Villa Romana Prize in 1907, which meant the use of a villa in Florence for a year. She was mostly on her own in Florence, for Karl was too busy to come, Hans could not interrupt his studies and Peter (aged eleven) visited only occasionally. At first she thought the city decadent but the light and life and the work of artists like Donatello began to move her. On a trip to Rome with an English friend she saw Michelangelo’s Pietà, and was overcome by his depiction of maternal love and the sanctity of suffering. The frescoes in the Italian churches seemed astonishingly bright in contrast to the urban poverty of industrial Berlin.
But Berlin, or the part where she and Karl lived, was her theme – the violence, the drunkenness and the suffering, the burdens put upon the wives of victims which she thought she had a duty to show. Käthe Kollwitz believed more in Rupp’s ideas of universal brotherhood than in political socialism – but duty was vital. When Heller’s wife died in 1909, Käthe could have left Karl for him, but she stayed, dreaming of her lover, telling a friend that when Karl and the boys no longer needed her she would return to Paris and to freedom. Her work, in fact, has few traces of what was new in Paris – and in 1911, with other artists, she signed a letter of protest against German museums buying French works of the avant-garde. Typical of her style, completely different to what she thought of as abstract art’s confusing obscurity, was the 1909 etching Unemployed – of a man in a
Käthe Kollwitz used the younger of her two sons, Peter, as a model. She held him for hours while working on the 1903 etching Woman with Dead Child , and when she complained of exhaustion, he said, ‘Don’t worry, Mother, it will be very beautiful.’ Hans, the elder boy, was more difficult: moody yet
imaginative. She thought that Hans was like her and she found Peter easier. While not demonstrative, she spoke freely to her children and, in this time of Freud, talked about sexual feelings and early love, far beyond what had been discussed during her own Königsberg childhood.
Her reputation grew with her technical skill in etching, drawing, lithograph and aquatint. On two trips to Paris, the art capital of the world, without Karl and the children, she met Rodin, visited museums, cafés and galleries and found the dance halls of Montmartre quite different to Rupp or Schmidt austerity or to industrial Berlin. Prenzlauerberg could give rise to a feeling of entrapment, with everyone dependent on her, but Käthe Kollwitz’s art was rooted irretrievably there or in her north-eastern origins – not in the bright colours and blurred boundaries between abstraction and realism that she found in Paris. In 1908 she followed the Weavers cycle with The Peasants’ War , inspired by a sixteenth-century revolution, where scenes of unforgiving darkness show human beings in beast-like conditions. Black Anna, leader of the revolutionaries, seems to lead her forces out of the earth in a great wave, doom and death etched into their raw, skull-like faces. Only the victims are shown, not the perpetrators of injustice. Battlefield has a peasant finding her dead son – for which the child Peter modelled, his mother weeping as she drew him.
It is a dark view. In Carmagnole , inspired by Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities , French revolutionaries dance against what looks like the tall, dense buildings of medieval Königsberg; Woman with Dead Child has its black and white heightened with gold wash, the mother apparently devouring her child; in 1903 Hans had nearly died of diphtheria. Female Nude from the Back of 1903 is one of her few uses of colour, the green shawl an unashamedly aesthetic touch.
Käthe Kollwitz’s diary has glimpses of the remembered Paris of 1904 and 1907, of a later love affair with the Jewish Viennese publisher Hugo Heller and of her secret erotic drawings inspired
by this. More freedom came through her winning of the Villa Romana Prize in 1907, which meant the use of a villa in Florence for a year. She was mostly on her own in Florence, for Karl was too busy to come, Hans could not interrupt his studies and Peter (aged eleven) visited only occasionally. At first she thought the city decadent but the light and life and the work of artists like Donatello began to move her. On a trip to Rome with an English friend she saw Michelangelo’s Pietà, and was overcome by his depiction of maternal love and the sanctity of suffering. The frescoes in the Italian churches seemed astonishingly bright in contrast to the urban poverty of industrial Berlin.
But Berlin, or the part where she and Karl lived, was her theme – the violence, the drunkenness and the suffering, the burdens put upon the wives of victims which she thought she had a duty to show. Käthe Kollwitz believed more in Rupp’s ideas of universal brotherhood than in political socialism – but duty was vital. When Heller’s wife died in 1909, Käthe could have left Karl for him, but she stayed, dreaming of her lover, telling a friend that when Karl and the boys no longer needed her she would return to Paris and to freedom. Her work, in fact, has few traces of what was new in Paris – and in 1911, with other artists, she signed a letter of protest against German museums buying French works of the avant-garde. Typical of her style, completely different to what she thought of as abstract art’s confusing obscurity, was the 1909 etching Unemployed – of a man in a
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