NEW YORK — Käthe Kollwitz is a persistent presence throughout the Museum of Modern Art retrospective of her work. She confronts visitors at the opening of the show, in self-portraits made early in her career, staring at the viewer with youthful self-possession and a keen sense of intelligence. And she is seen at the end of the exhibition, as an elderly figure in the late 1930s, in yet more self-portraits and as the unnamed woman in a lithograph, “Call of Death,” with a spectral hand touching her shoulder.
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The great German artist, who documented the personal and cultural toll of Germany’s social and political crises from the 1890s through the horrors of Adolf Hitler and World War II, makes herself an intimate part of her art. In her self-portraits, her hands are often foregrounded, clutching her heart, pressed to her cheek, holding a pen or pencil. In one striking pastel image, her oversize hand rests in front of her, disembodied, slightly grotesque, a talisman of strength and the agent of her creative power. In a late plaster sculpture, “The Lamentation,” a woman with Kollwitz’s features holds both hands to her face, as if to contain grief and quiet unruly thoughts.
Few artists of the 20th century are so intimately present in their work, so willing to express the deeply personal in public, without apology or obfuscation. Kollwitz lost a son to World War I, which almost broke her. But she also watched as a country with enormous potential to define a new and progressive social compact was lost to ideology, bigotry and mass violence. She was the conscience of her age, and she wore that conscience, along with her heart, on her sleeve.
That makes the MoMA show, the first major museum retrospective in the United States to gather a compelling cross section of her work in three decades, a deeply powerful and exhausting experience. As other artists working in Germany during the same period steeled themselves with irony and satire, rendering the worst of the world in lurid shapes and hues, Kollwitz stared it down without flinching. There was no Brechtian alienation or humor in her view of things, and none of the savage transformations of George Grosz or Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. She had powerful political sympathies, on the left, but never belonged to the artistic circles that processed horror into style. She stood to the side of expressionism, dada and the New Objectivity, making art about hungry people, sick people, hopeless people, people with only death as an escape.
For that, her reward has been condescension, during her life and for decades after her death in 1945, about a week before Hitler’s suicide and the end of the Third Reich. Grosz called her work “teary eyed,” while the mid-century American critic Clement Greenberg dismissed her “inevitable excess” of emotion. She committed a number of sins against artistic orthodoxy, making art for a large public, making art that was figurative rather than abstract, making art focused on the emotional lives of women and narratives of motherhood and loss.
But the curators, Starr Figura with assistance from Maggie Hire, emphasize the deeply deliberative process of Kollwitz. Emotion was in the foreground, but heightened by a relentless process of self-criticism and editing. In each of the four broad periods of her career, she produced a major cycle of prints, and in the first of those, “A Weavers’ Revolt” begun in 1893, she works and reworks the hands of a grieving woman in the last plate. In one version, a gaunt female figure stands by a door as the bodies of slain workers are carried in, her hands folded in front of her. In the final version of the same plate, she holds her hands to her sides, straight armed, with the fingers clenched tightly into fists.
Even more dramatic and moving is the effort she exerted to refine a devastating 1903 print called “Woman With Dead Child.” That image evolved from another, related one, titled “Pietà,” which shows a muscular adult figure of uncertain gender holding the limp torso of an equally androgynous child, with closed eyes and an ashen face. The Pietà image feels a bit like a film still, well composed but carefully framed, seen straight on and slightly removed from the viewer. “Woman With Dead Child,” by contrast, feels monumental, an incursion of visceral pain into the space of the viewer. The woman is equally muscular, and the child just as tragically lifeless. But the embrace is far more powerful and desperate. The woman’s hair, increasingly lost into shadow, is stringy and thin, while less of her face is visible. Her individuality is now entirely subsumed into grief. She cries into the body of the child, as if to muffle her own sobs with the flesh of the being she has irretrievably lost.
A cogent catalogue essay by Figura makes an essential point: There was something radical about rendering women’s grief as raw and inconsolable. Women, in Germany at the beginning of the last century, were expected to be more stoical, more measured and restrained in the expression of emotion. Kollwitz wasn’t just depicting something that didn’t belong in polite society — untrammeled sorrow — she was offering that same image as a symbol, or political icon. Women’s pain was active and desperate, embodying the agony felt across a society riven by deep inequities and injustice.
Women’s solidarity was powerful as well, and the only recourse for women who lost children to hunger, disease and war. In her second major print cycle, “Peasants War,” the female figure with clenched hands becomes an active agent of social change, and again Kollwitz works doggedly to get the hands right. In the end, the figure known as Black Anna, the heroine of a 16th-century peasant revolt, holds her hands above her head, fingers slightly cupped, spurring on a desperate charge of peasants against oppressive power.
Her hands look a bit like those of a conductor, calling forth apocalyptic sounds from an orchestra. Kollwitz worked on this image in 1902 and 1903, around the same time that Gustav Mahler began working on his Symphony No. 6, which includes giant hammer blows in its last movement. That is a coincidence, but the two works share a superfluity of expressive power, an expressionism that isn’t officially Expressionism, but still devastating in effect.
The revolutionary sentiments of “A Weavers’ Revolt” and “Peasants War” gave way to pacifism after World War I. In another cycle, “War,” she depicted women as mothers, not just grieving the losses of war, but bound together in self-defense. “The Mothers,” yet another image over which she labored for ideal expression, shows women tightly clutching each other, cleaving to themselves in a circular mass of arms, hands and faces. One thinks of herd animals that will circle each other, insulating the vulnerable from outside prey. In some versions of this image, a child stares out of that protective enclosure of flesh and fabric, wide-eyed to see the mess men have made of the world.
Kollwitz worked primarily in monochrome, in prints, lithographs, etchings. She embraced the reach of these media and created some of her most distilled and evocative images in service to her political beliefs — against war, especially. A 1923 poster, “Down With the Abortion Paragraphs!,” shows a despairing woman with skeletal eyes, clutching a child to her chest, 50 years before the Supreme Court upheld the right of women to determine the well-being of their own bodies, and almost a century before it took that right away in 2022.
One can’t experience the work of Kollwitz without thinking of other rights. Throughout her career, she asserted through her work the right to speak directly, clearly and unambiguously. American artists, especially African Americans, would embrace that in their art, sometimes echoing Kollwitz’s works directly, more often embracing her fusion of iconography and political expression. Kollwitz’s work circulated in this country in the 1920s and ’30s, in left-wing journals and occasional exhibitions. Charles White and Elizabeth Catlett, both African American creators, championed Kollwitz in their own work and in teaching younger generations. Eventually, the tide would turn, and Kollwitz’s refusal to cycle pain through abstraction or irony would be recognized as a heroic independence, part of the strength of character and purpose that flow from every image in this exhibition.
Even as the Nazis shut down her access to galleries, patrons and audiences, and included her work in one version of their infamous Degenerate Art exhibition, Kollwitz continued to make art, including some of the most powerful of her career. The final images of the show, including harrowing self-portraits, seem to assert one last, inalienable artist right: the freedom to represent herself as she was, as she saw herself, as time and grief and aging had their way with her physical form.
As the Nazis created vast tracts of propaganda about motherhood and service, blond women cradling blond children beneath the protective gaze of blond men, she made images of herself, with thinning hair and sunken eyes, and lips tightly pursed together. She is isolated, exhausted and very likely in despair at what had become of the country she honored far better than the monsters who now ruled it. I never met her, but I told her image what I would have said if I had: Thank you for your service.
Käthe Kollwitz is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York through July 20. moma.org.
