Tod, Frau und Kind (Death, Woman, and Child)

Abstract

This is a black etching on thick off-white paper. It features two figures that look like they are almost merging together by two hands. They are wearing white clothes on a dark background. In the bottom right of the etching printed in black is "Orig Pad van Kate Kollwitz". Written in graphite in the far-right edge of the paper reads "55-334" and "l113". There is masking tape residue on the top of the paper. Artist biography: K�the Kollwitz was a German painter, printmaker, and sculptor whose work accounted the human condition and tragedy of war. Her empathy for the less fortunate, expressed most famously through the graphic means of drawing, etching, and lithography, and woodcut, embraced the victims of poverty, hunger, and war. Initially her work was grounded in Naturalism and later took on Expressionistic qualities. Kollwitz�s father arranged for her to begin lessons in drawing and copying plaster casts when she was twelve. At 16 she began making drawings of working people, the sailors and peasants she saw in her father�s offices. Kollwitz enrolled in an art school for women in Berlin. In 1888 she went to Munich to study at the Women�s Art School, and learned her strengths as a draughtsman. Kollwitz worked extensively through World War I, creating lithographs and etchings, as well as drawings for a monument for her son Peter�s grave. He died during World War I in 1914. She built the monument, titled The Grieving Parents, in 1919, destroyed it, and then completed it in 1925. In 1933, after the establishment of the National-Socialist regime, the Nazi Party authorities forced her to resign from the Academy of Arts in Berlin and her work was removed from museums. From here, she worked in a smaller studio, completing her last major cycle of lithographs. She was evacuated from Berlin in 1943. Later that year, her house was bombed and many drawings, prints, and documents were lost. She died just before the end of World War II. 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 50. These self-portraits constitute a lifelong honest self-appraisal.