Kathe Kollwitz

Kathe Kollowitz was a truly melancholy artist, very potent in her strong, almost masculine strokes, and protective fierceness her artwork reflects her love of children and the poignant loss of her own. Several of her pieces also show images of weak, broken women, a reflection of the sickness and poverty seen as she was growing up in Germany, and her own unabashed dismay of it. Stranded in a very poor part of Germany during both World Wars, she was a first hand witness to the suffering of the urban poor, reflecting it in her artwork with morbid, dark images. Her images of motherhood also correspond directly to her own loss of her son in WWI and the death of her grandson in WWII. Kollowitz work is powerful, gloomy, and truthful, showing her own feelings of horror at the misfortune she had seen around her. Few of the images are very realistic or direct correspondents to what she was seeing, but rather abstracted, surreal images of her own emotions that saturated her art in shadows and rank oppression.