German printmaker KŠthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) is often, if unfairly, regarded as a propagandist. Though she lived a middle-class life–a servant helped run her household, freeing her to work–she lived in the poorest district of Berlin, where her physician husband saw his patients. Even as a child she was fascinated by the “native rugged simplicity” of workers’ faces; later she said that middle-class people didn’t interest her, and that an “upper-class educated person” is “not natural or true…not a human being in every sense of the word.” Though she declared she wasn’t a communist, in her prints she portrayed workers’ present and past struggles, and she consistently protested war.
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Kollwitz frequently depicts mothers and children. After she lost a son to World War I, she spent years working on a memorial sculpture for his cemetery; the dozen or so prints of mothers and children here depict a wide range of emotions. Kollwitz organizes the composition of the 1910 etching Mother With Child on Her Arm around a tiny sliver of light on the mother’s right cheek as she faces her son, their lips almost touching. The curved lines that shade the mother’s face, the curl of the child’s hair, the lines on their garments, and the gentle angle of the mother’s hand on his back all seem to swirl about this sliver of light. Focusing on the tiny distance between the two faces, Kollwitz transforms it into a depiction of an almost sacred connection.
Kollwitz first attracted attention with a suite of etchings inspired by a play: Gerhart Hauptmann’s 1892 The Weavers, which dramatizes a failed 1840s revolt of Silesian weavers protesting mechanization. The one print from that series here, Weavers’ Uprising (1897), has the drama and movement of a theater scene; its central feature–a line of marching workers–could be a theatrical set piece. But little about the scene is triumphant. It’s unified by the workers’ downward progress from left to right, and as the line moves toward the foreground, more of the heads are bowed and eyes downcast. In addition to prefiguring the failure of the revolt, Kollwitz organizes the crowd’s mixture of defiance and defeat into a visually unified progression. It’s apparent from this print and from the children’s diverse expressions in Seed Corn Should Not Be Ground that Kollwitz doesn’t necessarily see unity as a good thing. Perhaps the most unified composition here is The Prisoners, a 1908 etching. The handcuffs on a group of men gather and constrain their impressive energy in space just as a single rope confines their bodies. Many eyes are in shadow, and the whole group has the feel of a single mass, united through imprisonment.
I did ask Romano about Me and the Ghost, a smaller picture with a crying figure on the left, a ghostly outline on the right, and a table in front on which sit black silhouettes of a lone figure crying, a copulating couple, an automobile. The figure’s weeping isn’t very convincing: her face is barely sad, and her cartoonish tears are ridiculously blue. Romano says the scene is a bit like a drive-in movie, with the figure “looking over situations–the black silhouetted figures–that have happened to me.”
