In a very fine show, Kaethe Kollwitz, the remarkable German woman artist specializing in drawings, has been presented with distinction. I had first seen her work many years ago, when I was in college. At that time, I found her overly emotional–too skewed in favor of melodrama and excessively tragic assertion–German, the artist had lost her son during the First Worlld War, and much female grief occurs in her art. The generally dark tenor, indeed the tonally shadowed visual quality of the pictures, seemed to me an overassertion. I was wrong: Kollwitz actually eschews excessive feeling in favor of a genuinely tragic perception: the persistence of suffering. Granted, the personal is given close attention, in the form of Kollwitz’s ongoing attention paid to the troubles of people. Much of this emphasis had to come from the two lost wars the artist experienced as someone from Germany.
But, interestingly in this exhibition, it is clear Kollwitz attended to other topics: self-portraits, erotic activities, workers’ demonstrations. Most often, the experience of these drawings is one of muted darkness. It is easy to see such darkness as not only conducive to a dramatic formal experience; it also works as a demonstration of metaphoric vision, in which the sadness of unhappy public and private events is made clear by the drawings’ lack of light, quite literally.
Yet it must also be said that, quite literally, brilliant effects of light occur often enough in Kollwitz’s drawing–in remarkable and successful contrast to the generally shadowed atmosphere. Usually, Kollwitz’s faces attract light; their features are bathed in a luminosity that is both humanistic and visionary in the same moment, even when they are engulfed by pain. The work, always figurative, suggests large themes through Kollwitz’s unremitting theme of people’s suffering and, equally important, the artist’s remarkable empathy in the face of sorrow.
It must also be noted that Kollwitz’s largeness of spirit, the strength of her emotional life, is a consequence of her female gender. In the erotic drawings, the woman’s place in the expression of love is treated as equal rather than as submissive. And in her self-portraits, Kollwitz’s unusual strength of character comes through in outstanding fashion. By concentrating on the vulnerability of others, in both a private and public sense, the artist underscores her female compassion. One can sense her maternal warmth as well. While such qualities are now debated as inherently gender-based, it looks very much like Kollwitz saw them as stemming inexorably from being female.
But limiting Kollwiz’s strengths by insisting they belong to a particular gender does not do justice to the size of her imagination. As an artist of large emotional gifts, she was able to identify suffering as the sad result of living–and not from war alone, although as a German artist, the two wars she lived through would sharply concern her; the loss of her youngest son in the First World War surely overwhelmed her and deeply influenced the tenor of her visual activities. A major part of her attractiveness comes from her ability to understand and even identify with common sorrow. This willingness to consider the difficulties of everyday, most often poor people more than likely possessed a political component; Kollwitz was of strongly leftist sympathies, although she turned from communism over time. Her progressive leanings are not sympathized with much now, bu the left gave her a structure, a platform, allowing her to add a public aspect to her private empathies. While her drawings are only rarely given to overt political statement, she did demonstrate left-wing leanings in a few.
Kollwitz was born in Koenigsberg (now Kalingrad, in Russia) in July 1867. In 1887, she went to study painting at the Berlin Academy for Women Artists, where she also became acquainted with graphic art. From then on, her work consisted not only of etchings and works on paper, but also even sculpture, evident in the several three-dimensional works in this show.
In 1891, after returning to Koenigserg, she married Karl Schmidt, a doctor sympathetic to the poor, who opened a clinic for the working class in Berlin. It looks like the experience of suffering, via her husband’s clinic, made Kollwitz permanently sympathetic too the dispossessed. The artist’s liberal, bourgeois upbringing likely predisposed her to such sympathy, which was intensified by her actual exposure to the denied. Indeed, the show pointed out, with extreme clarity, the extraordinary empathy characteristic of her themes. But, along with her determination to convery conditions of trouble, it cannot be forgotten that Kollwitz possessed remarkable technical skill in drawing and graphic art.
Her characterizations of people, including herself, are sympathetic in the extreme. Such sympathy indicates a remarkable inner state informed by events. Today, when Kollwitz’s identification with the dispossessed is more or less ignored in art as a contemporary, justified theme, it would be wise to see her oeuvre clearly, for it suggests that heartfelt emotion is not something to be derided, but admired as an indication of depth.
In contemporary life, at least in America, leftist politics have moved from large topics such as the economy to highly personal ones such as gender. This is no place to discuss the strengths or weaknesses of such a change, but it is clear that much art, especially in the overheated landscape of New York City, has proven to be riddled with intense self-regard. Kollwitz shows no such self-importance, not even when she is drawing likenesses of herself. So the key to her work, greater than admirable, lies in her willingness to defer to her subject matter. This results in a selflessness of the first order. It transcends her remarkable abilities, transforming class difference into a meaningful bridge,in whichhergiftsofan artist, as extraordinary as they are, look like they yield (but only slightly!) to her feelings for the poor.
These feelings are so strong as to erase all exceptions made in regard to her work. Kollwitz did not turn her art into ideology; rather, she transformed her sensibility, and hopefully ours, into a serious regard for those without. More than a century after she started working, Kollwitz’s imagination does not reproach the well-to-do so much as advance the plight of the dispossessed. It is a creative realism we have lost almost all contact with.
Art leads nowhere unless it leads to a door opening beyond the immediate self. The current cultural obsession with one’s own preoccupations has not resulted in much. As time goes on, Kollwitz seems more resolute and valuable than ever; her art of feeling, in the face of injustice and unremitting suffering, can be understood as transparently accomplished.
Indeed, the indignity of poverty becomes immediate in the show. This honesty, born of self-appraisal rather than self-regard, is apparent even in hr studies of herself. A work called Self-Portrait en face, done around 1904, is remarkable for its transmission of determination and committed integrity. Her thin hair, put behind her, closely frames Kollwitz’s nearly sculptural treatment of her face, which radiates a gaze of determination and strength. We cannot separate the notion of a public morality from personal description in this work; her head gives the impression of a stern nobility, someone truly given to imparting truth by portraying the lost, the poor, the recently dead.
In 1903, Kollwitz addressed a darker theme; Mother with Dead Child, a drawing done with brown and blue paster, shows a mother, huddled over a dead infant in swaddling clothes, cradling it in her arms. We do not see the infant’s face, but we do see that of the mother’s in silhouette. Her grim expression matches the tragic scenario. The two figures and the small bed, covered in linen, on which the dead child rests, are rendered in brown; the wall behind them, in blue.
The force in this pastel undeniably derives from Kollwitz’s extraordinary capacity for identifying with those undergoing personal grief. The tragic is emphasized through the work’s formalism, which is very high. One might comment on the stark, deeply unhappy nature of the subject matter; as noted, there is the sense that grief is overpowering in much of Kollwitz’s art. But any charge of excessive emotion is wrong; in this work, sorrow has its cause: the deceased child, in open sight, even if we do not see its face–only the back of its head. A more powerful sense of loss cannot be conveyed.
A later drawing, Mother, Clutching Two Children (1932), is achieved with charcoal on paper. The mother, on the left, embraces two children: a baby, its face in the middle of the group; and on the right, an awkward-looking youth with unkempt hair. The mother engulfs the children with her arms, her eyes closed with a beatific smile on her face/ The viewing audience understands the unspoken feeling of family as a primal emotion necessary for the continuation of kinship bonds.
Kollwitz’s work poses a question: How do we relate either to public or private tragedy? Her demonstrations of suffering, in their display of accommodated grief, suggest that the transformation of hardship into art results from the identification of the artist with the subject. By dramatizing the plight of the poor, Kollwitz had to face the difficult problem of establishing social awareness in art, without the works becoming ridden with ideology. There is no ideology to be found in Kollwitz’s art. Instead, she presents a compassionate reading of conditions and events many artists walk away from. Her work thus movingly transcribes conditions she she herself is not necessarily faced with, but which she is sympathetic to.
Kollwitz was not daunted by any fear in representing desire. In a 1913 plaster sculpture called The Lovers, about 30 inches high, the artist portrays a woman sitting on the lap of a man. Both are without clothes and kiss passionately. The female figure has short hair, and the dull green and tan plaster acts as a neutral ground, so that the forms can be appreciated. Inevitably, though, the portrayal of desire comes first. Always the artist achieves remarkable effects by means of her intense involvement with the subject matter. Her empathy embraced personal paint and private life, but it also met with themes that broke out of the personal into the public. This can be seen in some of the poster imagery she made; in a 1924 lithograph, called Never Again War!, Kollwitz portrays a woman, close ti anguishedm who raises some sort of token in her right hand. Her expressions and wild outcrop of black hair, give strong dramatic interest to her call. One might see the image as melodramatic, but the impression, both immediate and lasting, is one of strong compassion with the woman demonstrating. Sadly, there would be another great war, the second instigated by the Germans, that Kollwitz would have to live through. Yet the tenets of her imagination, her feelings for the regularly unrecognized
suffering of the lower classes, as shown by her treatment of individual pain, never wavered. Unhappy events continued in her life; she lost her grandson, killed while in combat in 1942 during the Second World Two years before that, her husband had died, while her studio was destroyed by fire in 1943, doing away with most of her work. Kollwitz would go on to die a few weeks before the war ended.
Many seeing Kollwitz’s works feel she is the last major Expressionist artist from Germany. One appreciates the comment, but perhaps the reading is more complicated that that. It is true that Kollwitz stayed close to a realism dominated by feeling. But is also true that restraint echoes throughout her visual tragedies. This creates a context in which the artist’s feeling takes on measure, deepening the weight of the suffering we encounter, and also framing that emotion rather than advancing it to excess, Rarely do we see Kollwitz succumb to excessi e morning. More often we notice the presentation of measure and restraint, characteristics not associated with expressionism’s vision. This is not to say that Kollwitz’s imagery was not devoted to extended feeling; indeed, her feeling is always very close to the surface of her themes. But it can also be said that Kollwitz was calm in her rendering of suffering, and that such rendering is marked by genuinely holding back it visual delivery.
So maybe Kollwitz balanced her expressionist tendencies with a classical realism, in which hardship is mediated by art’s distance from it. In this artist’s case, her devotion to the portrayal of injustice was carried by highly gifted skills. When one sees such beautiful work as Kollwitz makes, it becomes clear that the long tradition she belongs to, a realism intensified by close attention to pain, is expressionist but also classical , if such a counterintuitive term can be used,in nature. My own feeling is tha Kollwitz owes as much to realist sympathies, conveyed by skill and a sense of the bigger picture, as she does do to an overtly emotional reading of events.
There is a beautiful lithograph, from 1903, called Nude, from Behind, on Green Cloth. It is a wonderful study of a nude whose back occupies most of the composition. Only the back of hre head is visible; it is bent downward, toward the front of the torso, and so only her hair, merging with the indistinct darkness of the background, cans be seen. The subject appears to be holding a towel to the front of her body; the viewer can see a piece of it falling between her arm and torso. Light falls on her shoulders and on the rug, on either side of her. The rest of the interior can only be described aa bathed in a luminous darkness.
This graphic piece is a fine study evidencing Kollwitz’s technical abilities; it is a work of objective realism, resulting in a formal description that is simply that and not treated as a window onto strong feeling. Even so, the diffused light in which the body is treated leads to the suggestion of a transcendent exactitude, in which the body’s beauty is admired for itself alone. In this sense, the print reflects an achievement built more on form than on feeling.
In a 1918 line etching, called The Mothers, a group of women stand before us, some with features and some not. A grim-faced older woman, holding a parcel, stares back at her viewers. In the middle of the composition, another woman, faceless, carrying a child in front of her, gets our attention. Others in the group are anonymous by virtue of their lack of features; some do have recognizable countenances. They form a group, more or less anonymous, but they level a charge against their audience: the difficulties of life do not attract enough sympathy.
The life of Kollwitz is moving in its refusal to deny compassion for those hit worst by luck. She is more than a sympathetic artist; she is someone who has given herself to a vision of redemption by virtue of her shared compassion. It is not as though Kollwitz has not suffered herself; we remember she lost a son and a grandson in world wars. But she never wavered in her wish to dissipate other people’s sorrow by demonstrating her hand in art, as well as connecting with those she drew. This is the most we can ask for in art; it is all we can do, the best we can do. As time goes on, and we move increasingly toward self-involvement in culture,, and grow satisfied with personal musings alone, we need to return our interest to Kollwitz, whose moral stature equaled her extraordinary gifts in art.
Texto en español
