Today I discovered Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945), an amazing German artist whose powerful anti war work spanned the turbulence and dangers of two wars.
In July 1936, she was visited by the Gestapo and threatened with arrest and deportation to a Nazi concentration camp. She and her husband resolved to commit suicide to avoid that fate. Fortunately, no further action was taken against her.
#kollwitz #artists #art #lithographs #til
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A4the_Kollwitz
@darren [1/2]
Oh, how interesting, so glad you could discover Käthe Kollwitz.
I grew up in (West) Berlin in the 1970s and 80s and Kollwitz was very much present in exhibitions in museums and private art galleries at the time.
The artist and art dealer Hans Pels-Leusden was a Kollwitz collector, and I attended the opening of one Kollwitz exhibition in his gallery. My grandmother had given me some money and I used it to buy one of the exhibits, a fry point etching print, right on the day of the opening.
It is the last sheet of the Peasant War cycle, from 1908. It's called The Prisoners, a remarkable piece. The face of the person on the left clearly is that of Käthe Kollwitz. It has travelled with me with every move since. I don't always put it up, sometimes the piece and I need a break from each other, but currently it leans against the wall in my study.
https://www.kollwitz.de/en/sheet-7-prisoners
#KätheKollwitz #art #HansPelsLeusden #PeasantWar #resistance
@darren [2/2]
We have another line edge print by Kollwitz, from 1919, The Mourner, darkly depicting a man paying his respect at the funeral of the revolutionary leader Karl Liebknecht. Liebknecht had been murdered by paramilitaries in final stages of the fevered time after the 1914-1918 war.
The print is from my late father's collection, it now hangs in our living room. My father was born a little after Liebknecht's death, he was drafted in to be a soldier in Russia as a very young man, and after 1945 he became an active Social Democrat to build a new democratic Germany. His poliitical positions were quite different from those of Karl Liebknecht two or three generations earlier. And yet, he felt a common cause, and the art of Käthe Kollwitz brought them together.
Good to meet a fellow Kollwitz friend here on Mastodon!
Darren du Nord
the roamer