The New Yorker:

The German printmaker, who took war and revolution as her subject, stretched the narrative boundaries of the form—putting women, especially mothers, at the center of the action.

By E. Tammy Kim

On my only trip to Berlin, in 2019, I saw a lot of Käthe Kollwitz. I walked through Kollwitzstrasse and Kollwitzplatz, near the site of her home, in Prenzlauer Berg. At the Staatliche Museen and at the museum that bears her name, I studied her etchings, with their threadlike details of landscapes of combat, and her political posters, with their spare female figures. A reproduction of her Pietà sculpture, “Mother with Her Dead Son”—her titles are never oblique—sits in the Neue Wache memorial, in the center of the city, as a remembrance of the victims of war. What looks, at first, to be a triangular black mound reveals a cloaked woman, curved around a young corpse, her fingertips touching his. Many of Kollwitz’s German contemporaries, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, took war and revolution as their subjects. But her work still scrapes us raw.

The Museum of Modern Art has convened a major Kollwitz retrospective, the largest such show in the U.S. in three decades and the first in New York City. The exhibition brings together more than a hundred pieces, focussing on her lithographs, etchings, woodcuts—her primary media—but rewinding them into sketches and drafts that reveal how they came to be. Though printmaking is an extension of drawing, its reliance on metal tools and near-infinite reproducibility can create a distance between artist and viewer. The exhibition seeks to close this gap. (The curators did their best to dim the lights and shield her work from the din of the rest of the museum.) I felt close to Kollwitz as I stood before the tentatively drawn hands in the marginalia of an unfinished self-portrait; I noted the change in a subject’s posture, from resigned, in a pencil-and-ink sketch, to rageful, in a finished etching.

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