Focus On: Käthe Kollwitz

I am kind of surrounded by art thought and art theory all. the. time. now, but one thing I'm not really doing is writing about it. So, what I think I will do is talk about one work a week from the Indiana University Art Museum.

Yesterday I went to a little lecture/tour in the museum's print collection. Prints, unlike most other works of art, can't really be on view most of the time--the paper is really sensitive to light and other conditions, so most of the time, prints are not on view at IU. You can make appointments to see specific works, but they have also decided to open up the space one Friday each month, and lay out about 20 prints on the tables. The curator talks about them, and then you can walk around and look. The theme this month was German Expressionism.

I know a little bit about German Expressionism, because my undergrad institution has some in their collection, but most of it is new to me. There was a strange mix of people for the lecture--some students, but mostly older community members. I met another young woman outside the gallery, and after chatting I know that she doesn't go to IU, is here in town with her fiance, who is a chemistry PhD candidate, she is originally from South Carolina, she used to do lithography and printmaking, and she gave me some winery tips. We were really hoping that they had some of Käthe Kollwitz's work.

And here she is:
(Death, Woman and Child, 1910. Thanks to MoMA online for the image--IU's online images are bad/nonexistent. They are working on it.)

It's a powerful print, made more so by the fact that it is straight-up gorgeous. It's so smooth and modeled and gentle, and it seems like the mother and child are fused together, while some dark, ominous cloud in the upper portion is pulling them apart. If you look very closely, you can see the child's fingers gripped tightly in the mother's hand. It's enough to break your heart.

As my new printmaking friend and I were looking at Death, Woman and Child, an older, elegantly dressed woman came and stood next to us. She began to speak in a lilting German accent. "In my hometown, Cologne, there is a Käthe Kollwitz museum, in one of the cathedrals. Her father was a socialist and her husband a doctor, and they both influenced her art by introducing her to many poor people, who were often her subjects. She and her husband lived in the slums where he treated his patients. Her son died in World War I, and her grandson in World War II." She looked at her hands. "She knew pain. So much pain in Germany, then, yes." She is right. What else is there to say?

Kollwitz commented on living and working in scenes of abject poverty: "It was not until much later...when I got to know the women who would come to my husband for help, and incidentally also to me, that I was powerfully moved by the fate of the proletariat and everything connected with its way of life.... But what I would like to emphasize once more is that compassion and commiseration were at first of very little importance in attracting me to the representation of proletarian life; what mattered was simply that I found it beautiful."

This grieving mother and child, if not a scene that Kollwitz often saw, was certainly something that she would have encountered. And the thing is, she's right--the image is beautiful. And terrible. All at the same time.