Kathe Kollwitz

Kathe Kollwitz made prints and sculpture about poverty, war and grief for fifty years, lost a son and a grandson to two wars, and was thrown out of the Prussian Academy by the Nazis. She trained in Berlin and Munich in the women's art schools that existed because the academies did not admit women, married a doctor who ran a practice for the poor in a working-class district of Berlin, and lived among his patients for the rest of her working life. That is her subject. The Weavers cycle of 1898 and the Peasants' War prints made her reputation; the empress blocked a gold medal for the first on the grounds that the work was unsuitable for a woman. Her younger son Peter was killed in Flanders in 1914, weeks after volunteering with her reluctant consent, and she spent eighteen years making the granite memorial figures of two kneeling parents now at Vladslo. Her later work is almost entirely black and white - woodcuts and lithographs of hunger, of mothers holding children back from death, and the poster reading Never Again War. She was the first woman elected to the Prussian Academy and was expelled in 1933. Her grandson died in Russia in 1942. She died weeks before the war ended. Her sculpture of a mother sheltering children stands in the Neue Wache in Berlin as the national memorial to the victims of war and tyranny, enlarged from a small original. The Kathe Kollwitz Museum in Cologne holds the largest collection of her work. She kept a diary from 1908 to 1943 that is published and widely read.

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