Art & Economics: Kӓthe Kollwitz...
Part One: The Working Class
When I visit a museum or gallery, what interests me most is the artist's process, how they solve the technical puzzle that transforms a collection of disparate materials and mediums (pigments, burnt sticks of wood, canvas, paper, clay, etc.) into an image, representation, or experience. I delight in the imperfections that reveal how the mind works through a visual problem – masking tape left on a Rothko canvas (whether by neglect or design), pencil lines visible through watercolor paint, rough sketches in the margins of what at first glance appear to be an otherwise finished piece. I especially love it when an artist casually glues a piece of paper over an original sketch to rework the composition. I admire irreverence.
Two art exhibits that explore the artist process in depth are happening simultaneously in New York and Philadelphia this Summer of 2024. Kӓthe Kollwitz: A Retrospective is at the Museum of Modern Art through July 20th, and Mary Cassatt at Work is showing at the Philadelphia Museum of Art until September 9th. Stylistically, there couldn't be two more different artists who still manage to share a lot in common. Both women famously focused on mothers, children, and working-class women – though they came at their subjects from very different worlds. Both were professional artists who supported themselves financially with their art. And arguably, both Cassatt's and Kollwitz's best work was made through the process of printmaking.
The German artist Kӓthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) is less of a household name in America than Cassatt, though not entirely obscure. During her lifetime, she achieved international fame, won numerous awards, and was the first female appointed professor at the Berlin Academy of Arts. She lived through two world wars - losing first her son Peter in WWI and then her grandson in WWII. An active Socialist, in 1933, she and other Berlin Academy of Arts members signed a letter – The Dringender Appell für die Einheit (The Urgent Call for Unity) calling for the defeat of the National Socialists German Workers (Nazi) Party. She and her husband were also among the nineteen who signed a second letter protesting Hitler's appointment as German Chancellor. After Hitler’s appointment and the Nazi’s rise to power, she was forced to resign from the Academy and no longer allowed to exhibit her work. At one point, the Gestapo threatened to arrest and transport Kollwitz and her husband to a concentration camp. But her international reputation protected them. America was among the countries that offered her sanctuary, which she ultimately refused, fearing that family members would face reprisals if she left Germany. In 1943, after her home and studio were destroyed in an Allied air raid, she was evacuated to a town outside of Dresden and became the guest of Prince Ernst Heinrich of Saxony. She died there in 1945.
Kollwitz saw herself as an advocate of the people. She was a social realist and represented war through the eyes of the working classes' mothers, wives, and sisters. The children she portrays are malnourished, hollow-eyed, dying, or dead. Women are either leading the revolution or cradling the bodies of those who died in it. She primarily worked in a palette of blacks and grays. Only one or two examples are exhibited at the MOMA feature color – an early study that looks like a student work called Female Nude, from Behind, on Green Cloth, and in the changing background of the many iterations of her print Woman with Dead Child. But these are the outliers of the show.
The harshness of heavily applied black ink occasionally softened with gray washes, and ragged lines drawn using thick sticks of charcoal make sense of a life bookended by two world wars. Kollwitz's marks on paper are violent and emotional. You would never look at one of her pictures and think it "pretty."
Though it includes some sculptures, the MOMA retrospective focuses on the artist’s printmaking, which was Kollwitz's medium of choice. Perhaps the most impactful example of Kollwitz's process is a series of drawings showing how she methodically refined the composition of the print Sharpening the Scythe (one of seven etchings from her Peasant's War series). There's a video on MOMA's website detailing the evolution of the composition, but in the gallery, you don't need the narrative to understand what she is doing. The first rough charcoal sketch of a man standing behind a seated woman, crouched over and around her, instructing her on how to hold a scythe becomes an etching, which she then reworks over top of in charcoal. The next etching shows the woman standing alone, a full-figure portrait. The blade is facing up, her arm draped over it. In the next drawing, Kollwitz crops the image and closes in on just her subject's face and the scythe blade. She makes another print and draws over top of it in charcoal. She glues a piece of paper over her subject's hand and draws it in a new position. In the final version, the woman grips a whetstone, sharpening the blade, and stares at the viewer. The effect is menacing
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War and its aftermath were Kollwitz's primary subjects. Her early series of etchings – The Weaver's Revolt and The Peasant's War are historical illustrations that began as pen and ink drawings. Later compositions, like Sharpening the Scythe, were first drawn using charcoal and meant to mimic the designs of German war propaganda posters. But she was not just interested in those killed in the fighting. The child, dead in its mother's arms in Death, Woman, and Child, was more likely to have died of starvation than a bullet. The German economic fallout after WWI caused in part by punishing reparation payments to Europe and the calling in of loans by the United States, was just as catastrophic as the actual fighting for German women & children. The German writer Ernst Haffner wrote about this period in his 1932 novel Blood Brothers, a story about Berlin youth gangs set during the final days of the Weimer Republic.
Eight boys, aged sixteen to nineteen. A few are veterans of borstals (detention centers). Two have parents somewhere in Germany. The odd one perhaps still has a father or mother someplace. Their birth and early infancy coincided with the war and the years after. From the moment they undertook their first uncertain steps, they were on their own. Father was at the Front or already listed missing. Mother was turning grenades, or coughing her lungs out a few grams at a time in explosive factories. The kids with their turnip bellies – not even potato bellies – were always out for something to eat in courtyards and streets. As they grew older, gangs of them went out stealing. Stealing to fill their bellies. Malignant little beasts.
Ernst Haffner was the German Upton Sinclair. I can imagine his novel illustrated by Kollwitz -- featuring tight pen & ink illustrations in the style of her Weaver's Revolt and Peasant’s War series. Haffner, too, was banned by the Nazis. Blood Brothers was thrown into the bonfires along with works of Thomas & Heinrich Mann, Zweig, Remarque, and Einstein.*
Exhibitions:
Kӓthe Kollwitz: A Retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, NYC, through July 20, 2024.
Mary Cassatt at Work at The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, through September 9, 2024.
This is part one of a two-part post. The second installment, in which I talk more about the Mary Cassatt show in Philadelphia and share my feelings on the two shows/artists, will be published tomorrow morning. It will also list the books I mention (and don’t) in both parts.
*Very little is known about Ernst Haffner. Some believe he was a social worker. A critic reviewing Blood Brothers contemporaneously refers to him as a journalist. We know that Blood Brothers was critically and popularly successful. That it was burned by the Nazis the year after it was published and that Haffner and his publisher were both called before the Cultural Ministry. That is where the trail ends. No picture exists—no record of what happened to him during or after WWII.