Artist research:
Kathe Kollwitz was a German painter, printmaker, and sculptor whose work offered a clear and often cutting account of the human condition. Her empathy for the less fortunate, expressed most famously through the graphic means of drawing, etching, lithography, embraced the victims of poverty, hunger, political , war and torture .
Kathe Kollwitz ‘s father was a radical Social democrat and her mother was the daughter of a pastor.Her education was greatly influenced by her grandfather's lessons in religion and socialism.
Recognizing her talent,her father arranged for her to begin lessons in drawing and copying plaster casts when she was twelve. She enrolled in an art school for women in Berlin. There she studied with Karl Stauffer-Bern. The etchings of Klinger, their technique and social concerns, were an inspiration to Kollwitz
In 1891 Kollwitz married Karl, by this time a doctor who tended to the poor in Berlin, where the couple moved into the large apartment that would be Kollwitz' home until it was destroyed in World War II. The proximity of her husband's practice proved invaluable:
"The motifs I was able to select from this milieu (the workers' lives) offered me, in a simple and forthright way, what I discovered to be beautiful.... People from the bourgeois sphere were altogether without appeal or interest. All middle-class life seemed pedantic to me. On the other hand, I felt the proletariat had guts. 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.
It is believed Kollwitz suffered from anxiety during her childhood. However, new research has concluded Kollwitz suffered from a neurological disorder during her childhood called Alice in Wonderland syndrome it is commonly associated with migraines and causes the sufferer to experience sensory hallucinations. This may have directly influenced her work later in life and inspired her to draw her subjects with large heads and hands.
While working on Peasant War, Kollwitz visited Paris twice, and enrolled in classes at the Académie Julian in order to learn how to sculpt.
After her return, Kollwitz continued to exhibit her work, but was impressed by the work of younger compatriots—the Expressionists and Bauhaus—and resolved to simplify her means of expression. Subsequent works such as Runover, 1910, and Self-Portrait, 1912, show this new direction. She also continued to work on sculpture.
Kollwitz lost her youngest son Peter on the battlefield in World War I.
As the war wound down and a nationalistic appeal was made for old men and children to join the fighting, Kollwitz implored in a published statement:
"There has been enough of dying! Let not another man fall!"
While working on the sheet for Karl Liebknecht, she found etching insufficient for expressing monumental ideas. After viewing woodcuts by Ernst Barlach at the Secession exhibitions, she completed the Liebknecht sheet in the new medium and made about thirty woodcuts by 1926.
In 1922–23 she produced the cycle War in woodcut form, including the works The Sacrifice, The Volunteers, The Parents, The Widow I, The Widow II, The Mothers, and The People. In 1924 she finished her three most famous posters: Germany's Children Starving, Bread, and Never Again War.
Working in a smaller studio, 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.
Kathe Kollwitz survived her husband and her grandson Peter, who died in action during World War II.
She evacuated Berlin in 1943. Later that year her house was bombed, and many drawings, prints, and documents were lost
How she showed her anger about dieing Innocent people?
How I was influence by her expressive sculpture in producing my work?
She lost her husband ,son and her grandson during world war I, II and also her house and studio in fact she lost everything just because of silly wars.
She decided to show her anger on her works.she produced a lot of human conditions(sad,tear,anger,anxiety) which influenced me to do the same .
I have exact life history which I left behind because of my political view.
Although I am sculptor and have made lot of sculptures which neither of them was made by my own idea, all of them ordered to me ,since I move to the UK and watch her works,I decided to make sculptures with my own idea and concept freely.
John
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