Käthe KOLLWITZ — a true icon of pacifism and class struggle
Disclaimer: The information provided in this episode comes from multiple sources and isnot my scientific studies or discoveries. Check the references for more details. Thank you!
Welcome to HerArt podcast, a project for art lovers, especially art created by women. In this episode, we will talk about Käthe KOLLWITZ — a true icon of pacifism and class struggle. My name is Nata Andreev and I am going to tell you seven curious facts that you didn’t know about the artist that could only be described by one term “Individualism.” Her eyes exuded a suggestive power. She had a certain way of looking at people.
Curious Fact #1
In 1919 she became the first woman in the Modern era to be elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts. After the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome and the Académies Royales in Paris, the Prussian Academy of Art was the oldest institution of its kind in Europe, with a similar mission to other royal academies of that time. Later she became the first woman professor there (she took up teaching in 1928).
Curious Fact #2
Recognizing her talent, Kollwitz’s father arranged for her to begin lessons in drawing and copying plaster casts when she was twelve. At sixteen she began making drawings of working people, the sailors and peasants she saw in her father’s offices. Wishing to continue her studies at a time when no colleges or academies were open to young women, Kollwitz enrolled in an art school for women in Berlin.
Curious Fact #3
Käthe lost her younger son, Peter, on the battlefield in World War I in October 1914, prompting a prolonged depression. By the end of the year, she had made drawings for a monument to Peter and his fallen comrades; she destroyed the monument in 1919 and began again in 1925. The memorial, titled The “Grieving Parents”, was finally completed and placed in the Belgian cemetery of Roggevelde in 1932.
Curious Fact #4
“The Weavers” was exhibited publicly in 1898 to wide acclaim. But when Adolf Menzel, was a German Realist artist, nominated her work for the gold medal of the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung in Berlin, Kaiser Wilhelm II withheld his approval. “Orders and symbols of honor belong to the chest of deserved men,” he once said.
Curious Fact #5
Kollwitz was a committed socialist and pacifist, who was eventually attracted to communism. In 1933, after the establishment of the National-Socialist regime, the Nazi Party authorities forced her to resign her place on the faculty of the Akademie der Künste following her support of the Dringender Appell. The “Urgent Call for Unity” was an appeal by the Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund to defeat the Nazis. Her work was removed from museums. Although she was banned from exhibiting, one of her “mother and child” pieces was used by the Nazis for propaganda. On her 70th birthday, she “received over 150 telegrams from leading personalities of the art world,” as well as offers to house her in the United States, which she declined for fear of provoking reprisals against her family. Käthe died just 16 days before the end of the war.
Curious Fact #6
Kollwitz made a total of 275 prints, in etching, woodcut, and lithography. Virtually the only portraits she made during her life were images of herself, of which there are at least fifty. These self-portraits constitute a lifelong honest self-appraisal; “they are psychological milestones”.
Curious Fact #7
More than 40 German schools are named after Kollwitz. Four museums, in Berlin, Cologne, and Moritzburg, and the Käthe Kollwitz Museum in Koekelare is dedicated solely to her work. The Käthe Kollwitz Prize, established in 1960, is named after her.
Thank you so much for listening to the third episode of HerArt podcast — a project for art lovers, especially art created by women. If you want to follow more of what we do, follow us on Facebook and Instagram. And don’t forget to tune in next month, when I am going to tell you about Maria PRYMACHENKO — the Ukrainian artist that made Picasso bow down.
See you!
References
artnet News | Wikipedia | MoMA
