Käthe Kollwitz

This rare combinatory-technique print is also one of Kollwitz’s first ventures into color printing. The sheet derives its subject from Émile Zola’s realist novel about miners, Germinal (1885). It depicts two men fighting over the novel’s heroine, Catherine, in a tavern interior. Kollwitz pressed sandpaper and Ziegler’s transfer paper into the soft ground of the copper plate to achieve a grainy, dotted pattern; after this she formed the image by etching. In this rare second state of the print, Kollwitz added the yellow tone with a lithographic stone. She abandoned the subject of Germinal after 1904.