The Käthe Kollwitz retrospective at the MoMa was nothing short of spectacular, and while I wasn’t blown away by the museum’s curatorial choices, when you have an artist whose work practically speaks for itself there’s no need for an overly-produced space. Kollwitz’s art is harrowingly contemporary, we might need to read the text panels to contextualize it historically, but the artist’s themes of class struggle and inequality are unescapable.
Käthe Kollwitz was a German painter, printmaker, and sculptor, who lived through some pretty major world events. Born in 1867, she saw the German Empire, World War I, the Weimar Republic, and the rise and fall of Nazi Germany during World War II until her death in 1945. Deeply influenced by the social and political context of the time, Kollwitz is known for her depictions of war, poverty, and the struggles of the working class, as well as her work exploring women’s role in society.
Political works about the German working class were the main corpus of the exhibition. In each frame on the wall, I was met by the gaze of people terrorized, emaciated, exhausted, resigned, but also protesting, fighting, charging, and asserting. Kollwitz spent her life depicting the proletariat, carefully threading the balance between showcasing the harsh conditions they were living in and their collective resistance. A balancing act wholly incorporated by retrospective as the visitor gets to experience Kollwitz’s studies and her final work side by side. We’re invited to observe the artist’s creative process and peer over her shoulder as she meticulously sketches her subject’s facial expressions and contorted faces, tweaking them ever so slightly before settling on a final version.
From the studies, I lingered on the difference in scale between Kollwitz’s sketches and her final work.
Take the sketch for a panel of A Weaver’s Revolt from 1897 (below, and all panels here) for example.
In the background, between the bed and the door, is a woman slightly hunched and with her hands together. While we may not be able to see her face, we can tell that she’s somber. Next to the final sketch is a pencil study of that same woman, but this time it seems like we’re holding up a magnifying glass over her. She’s bigger than the final rendition and more features of her face are revealed. Her eyebrows are downturning, her mouth is trembling, and the face of her skin is tense and lowering. In this study, Kollwitz zoomed in to take a closer look at what her face would have looked like, but ultimately decided to get rid of those details, settling on letting the shadows on the woman’s face tell us the story of her pain. We don’t need to see her pursed lips and sad eyes to know what she’s going through. Kollwitz relies on both the broader scene and the humanity of the viewer to tell her story. Our empathy fills in the blanks for us.
There is one work I can’t stop thinking about: Woman with Dead Child from 1903.
Sprawled across the wall are six different studies, each ever so slightly different than the other, each depicting the same Pietà scene of a mother holding her dead child. The woman is sitting cross legged on the floor, her hands, legs, and feet are overemphasized, and her body engulfs her lifeless child, whose features are, in contrast, exaggeratingly delicate. While we can see the child’s entire face, eyes and lips closed as if asleep, we can’t fully see the mother’s. Only her scrunched forehead and closed eyes are visible, but somehow that’s more than enough to feel her despair. Her face is hidden, almost as if the artist wanted to grant her some privacy in this time of mourning and also to - like A Weaver’s Revolt - let us fill in the blanks, with our imagination or our own memories. It’s more powerful to imagine what the mother’s face looks like rather than to see it.
This is a dark rendition of a time when child mortality was alarmingly high, but it is also a personal subject matter for Kollwitz, who herself lost a son. Looking at the six different studies I picture her obsessively studying every detail, painting her child over and over again. The only thing she has control over is how she’s going to immortalize him.
In elaborating her own grief, Kollwitz often went back to the theme of motherhood, and has produced many Pietà scenes.
Pietà, meaning "pity" or "compassion" in Italian, is a subject in Christian art depicting the Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus Christ after his crucifixion. This theme has been a significant motif in Western art for centuries, inspiring numerous artists to create their own interpretations. You might know The Pietà by Michelangelo, one of the most famous renditions of the subject.
Kollwitz also sculpted a Pietà scene, but unlike Michelangelo’s hers isn’t carved out of white marble, but bronze.
What’s fascinating about the origination of Pietà figures is that they are not scenes based on scriptures, they’re purely artistic creations. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that Mary held Jesus after the crucifixion, but Michelangelo, and those who reinterpreted the scene after him, saw the importance in materializing this moment.
Why is it such a powerful and recurring subject matter in art? Why does it impact us?
I think it’s because it commemorates life through the hope that nobody dies alone. In the Bible Jesus dies alone on the cross, but Michelangelo rests him in the arms of his mother.
The justaxposition between being alone and together is recurring in Kollwitz’s work, where her subjects, despite being clearly distinguishable, often appear as part of a whole, a unity. Bodies are merged together but still unique. The strength that lies in community. Nobody dies alone.
Woman with a Dead Child, like many of her subjects, is eerily contemporary. Themes of grief and resistance have always been part of visual culture and Kollwitz’s work serves as a reminder to not look away in the face of oppression. To cling on to our humanity. To not let ourselves become desensitized to images of violence. To work towards a collective awareness of who the oppressor is. To share the stories of those who don’t have a voice.
“I have no right to withdraw from the responsibility of being an advocate. It is my duty to voice the sufferings of people, the sufferings that never end and are as big as mountains.”
Käthe Kollwitz