By David D’Arcy

It is hard to think of a moment in the last 100 years when Käthe Kollwitz’s work has been more timely.

Käthe Kollwitz, Self-Portrait en Face with Right Hand (Selbstbildnis en face mit rechter Hand). c. 1900. Pastel on paper. Photo: Kienzle | Oberhammer

Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) didn’t have to search out human suffering and loss for the prints and drawings that she made for six decades. She lived and died in Germany during the worst years of its history. Think twice before you tell anyone, “may you live in interesting times.”

Kollwitz lived up to her era. Her early work revisits agrarian protests, with clear references to Imperial Germany. Later prints and drawings witness grueling poverty close to home in Berlin, where her husband, a doctor, treated the indigent. In deeply reflective self-portraits — always set against an empty background — Kollwitz looks at herself in her twenties and then through the end of her life. The sculpture on view, like the prints of workers’ uprisings, tends toward the tactile and monumental, whatever its scale.

No doubt this retrospective, at MoMA (through July 20) will be an introduction to Kollwitz’s work for many. It’s also a grim perspective on 20th century history. Her active years overlapped with two world wars, including the horrors of fascism in power. What we see, apart from posters and small sculptures, are prints and drawings in monochrome and under low light. They show mostly poor people in extremis — not the rousing massive work in color that draws the crowds.

When Kollwitz isn’t faulted by American art critics for being grim and depressing, she has been criticized for a lack of stylistic innovation or for looking backward formally. Don’t be deterred. It is hard to think of a moment in the last 100 years when her work has been more timely. And note that, with this show, the critics have been positive.

The first wall that visitors encounter is covered with self-portraits, starting with Kollwitz in her twenties, and then into her thirties when she became better known. I would wager she did as many as her famed fellow German Max Beckmann (1884-1950) did, but with a restraint that lacked the costumed drama and Beckmann’s smug mockery of everything (including himself).

Kollwitz focused a penetrating gaze inward, intent on providing a perspective on her own maturation linked to her mastery of a series of printmaking media. We know that, early on, she admired Albrecht Dürer, and that her trips to Paris as a young woman made her aware of the exacting standards of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Edgar Degas, and Auguste Rodin.

Her self-portraits have the assurance and presence of Old Master drawings,The early ones, where Kollwitz gazed straight ahead, announce that the confident woman who made them is breaking with accepted practice. Over decades, they also mark the passage of time in a life that Kollwitz observed with a steady honesty. Rembrandt comes to mind. Given her goals for society — justice, freedom, and equality, making pictures sounds like the easy part.

Käthe Kollwitz. Woman with Dead Child (Frau mit totem Kind). 1903. Line etching, drypoint, and sandpaper, Photo: Yale University Art Gallery

Kãthe Kollwitz was born Käthe Schmidt in 1867 in Königsberg, East Prussia, now the Russian city of Kaliningrad. She got her politics from her grandfather, a rebellious Protestant cleric who joined a breakaway church; her leftist father, a trained lawyer, worked as a builder, and advised her that being a mother and an artist would be difficult. He also said that she was lucky, because she was plain-looking, and men wouldn’t be swarming around to distract her. Encouragement, Prussian-style.

German art academies those days admitted no women, so Kollwitz trained at a “women’s school” in Berlin. Among her favorite subjects to depict were workers’ uprisings. When she won a prize in 1898 for the series A Weavers’ Revolt, the award was vetoed by no less than advisers to Kaiser Wilhelm II, who found that the poor were not subjects worthy of imperial praise. Artists knew better, and her reputation grew. Making work that mostly stuck to naturalistic norms, she wouldn’t call herself an expressionist later on (although critics still do), despite the darkness of her work.

Käthe Kollwitz. Never Again War! (Nie wieder Krieg!). 1924. Crayon and brush lithograph. Photo: Association of Friends of the Käthe-Kollwitz-Museum Berlin

Kollwitz abandoned painting for printmaking early in her studies. Her ambition in that medium is evident in A Weavers’ Revolt, which was inspired by Gerhart Hauptmann’s 1892 drama The Weavers, a tragic study of violently suppressed protests in the mid-19th century (Arts Fuse review). To take on that project, she abandoned a print series on Emile Zola’s Germinal, the classic epic French novel about a miners’ revolt.

In her diaries, the artist wrote that

“… occasionally my parents themselves said to me, ‘There are also cheery things in life. Why do you only show the dark side?’ That I could not answer. It held no charm for me. Only I must repeat once again, that originally pity and sympathy were only minor elements leading me to representation of proletarian life; rather, I simply found it beautiful. As Zola or someone said, ‘The beautiful is the ugly.’”

Instead of filing grand canvases, her scenes in those prints are fit into relatively small frames — small enough, she hoped, to circulate among workers and women. Kollwitz reached that audience more effectively with political posters like the famous Nie Wieder Krieg (Never Again War) from 1924, also at MoMA, in which an androgynous screaming protester holds up a fist. That figure’s contorted face is about as grotesque as Kollwitz gets.

The image sure to touch anyone is Mother with Dead Child (1904), a grieving mother sitting with her head lowered as if fused to a child’s lifeless body. It’s been said that the mother — whom Kollwitz modeled after herself, with the child modeled after her son, Peter — is seeking to ingest the child, to draw the corpse back into herself. On a closer look, the mother’s own body seems to be coming apart into sections, with a sculptural stillness in her limbs that looks and feels detached. Later in the show we see Kollwitz’s sculptures in three dimensions, but this scene, like her self-portraits, is Kollwitz at her most strikingly sculptural.

Käthe Kollwitz. Mother, Clutching Two Children (Mutter, zwei Kinder an sich pressend). 1932. Photo: courtesy Käthe Kollwitz Museum Cologne

And wrenching in its emotion. All the more so today because Peter, her son, would die in 1914, shot in Belgium in the first months of World War I. Kollwitz would also lose a grandson in action in Russia during World War II. By that time, her works were already declared “degenerate” and had been removed from museums. She was forced out of her job and out of Berlin. Kollwitz died in 1945, days before the Nazis surrendered.

Kollwitz composed the woodcuts of her later decades with heavy lines and a dense solidity. The figures in these scenes are mostly women, often clustered and clenching each other as if forming fortifications.

Kollwitz’s loss of her son in World War I occurred after she had initially endorsed the enlistment of the 18 year-old. After that, she veered away from protest and toward pacifism, but the anger raging in Nie Wieder Krieg suggests that her stated shift from revolution to evolution, as she made the distinction, would take time. That poster, reproduced endlessly before anyone knew how to pronounce Che Guevara, fulfilled her wish that, at a low price and in the right place, more than the privileged art audience might see her work. The Nazis got in the way of that for a while.

Those who have looked hard at Kollwitz’s work will stress that her art is paradoxical – radical and traditional. Fittingly, this show of mostly grim images is a cause for celebration.

David D’Arcy lives in New York. For years, he was a programmer for the Haifa International Film Festival in Israel. He writes about art for many publications, including the Art Newspaper. He produced and co-wrote the documentary Portrait of Wally (2012), about the fight over a Nazi-looted painting found at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.