Käthe Kollwitz

In August 1924, Käthe Kollwitz exhibited her suite of seven woodcuts, War, at the International Antiwar Museum in Berlin, a new museum founded by the anarcho-pacifist Ernst Friedrich. Kollwitz’s cycle portrays war entirely from the perspective of the home front, highlighting the sacrifices of mothers and children. She described her search for the most appropriate medium for the subject:

I initially began the war cycle as etchings. Came to nothing. Let it all lie. Then I tried with transfers [transfer lithographs]. There too almost never satisfying results. Whether the woodcut will do it? If that too doesn’t, then I have proof that it lies only within myself. Then I simply can no longer do it. In the torment of all these years small oases of joys and successes! [Journal entry of June 25, 1920]

War was one of a number of graphic cycles on the theme completed by various German artists in the early 1920s, including a series by Otto Dix [see the example in the case in this gallery], which was exhibited alongside that of Kollwitz.