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Introduction

A Process of Protest

Prints and Drawings of Käthe Kollwitz
July 28 - November 26, 2006

This exhibition celebrates a recent gift from an anonymous donor consisting of three drawings and sixty-three prints by the German artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945). The gift represents about a quarter of the artist's known prints, establishing RISD as a major center for the study of graphic art by this technically innovative and profoundly admired artist. Käthe Kollwitz's long life spanned the Empire of Wilhelm I (1871-1918), the ill-fated Weimar Republic (1919-33), and the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich (1933-45).

During the first year of World War I (1914), Kollwitz lost Peter, the younger of her two sons. In World War II, she lost not only her home and studio in Berlin to Allied bombing, but also her grandson, named after her son Peter. Often described as a socialist, Kollwitz never joined a political party, but remained a devoted pacifist. Although she shared some common goals with various leftist movements, she described herself as an "evolutionary" rather than a revolutionary. Throughout her creative life, Kollwitz's focus on the under classes-those parts of the population whose needs were overlooked by the government-never wavered. She wrote in her personal journal: "It is my duty to voice the sufferings of humankind, the never-ending sufferings heaped mountain-high. This is my task, but it is not an easy one to fulfill (January 4, 1920)."

Kollwitz never abandoned either her figural style or her commitment to the graphic arts. She employed etching, woodcut, and lithography with equal dedication. The rejected states, experiments with different media, and preparatory drawings on view help to elucidate the process by which Kollwitz arrived at the powerful visual rhetoric of her finished works. In her consistent transformation and reevaluation of her art, she pursued the technical and formal means by which best to arouse emotions and to exhort action.

Selected Objects

Käthe Kollwitz

Self Portrait, hand at forehead, ca. 1910, published 1918
No Image Available

Ernst Barlach

Woodcuts for Goëthe’s Walpurgisnacht, 1923

Käthe Kollwitz

Mourner (Der Trauernde), published 1933

Käthe Kollwitz

Death Seizes a Woman, 1934

Käthe Kollwitz

Outbreak, 1921

Käthe Kollwitz

Bust of a Working Woman with a Blue Shawl, 1903, published 1906

Käthe Kollwitz

Self-portrait, 1924

Otto Dix

Shot to Pieces (Zerschossene), 1924

Käthe Kollwitz

Maria and Elisabeth, 1929

Käthe Kollwitz

Working Woman in Profile towards the Left, 1903, published 1918

Käthe Kollwitz

Arming in a Vault, 1906, published 1921

Käthe Kollwitz

Arming in a Vault, 1918

Käthe Kollwitz, printmaker

The Battlefield, 1921

Käthe Kollwitz

Fight in the Pub, 1904 ?

Käthe Kollwitz

Help Russia!, 1921

Käthe Kollwitz

Run Over, ca. 1910

Käthe Kollwitz, printmaker

Self-portrait at a Table, ca.1893, published 1921

Käthe Kollwitz

Arming in a Vault, ca. 1902

Käthe Kollwitz

The Four Mourners (Die vier Trauernden), ca. 1919, published 1933

Max Liebermann

The Midday Meal, 1888

Adolph von Menzel

Head Studies, ca. 1882-1884

Käthe Kollwitz

Pregnant Woman, 1910, published 1921

Käthe Kollwitz

The Widow II, 1922

Käthe Kollwitz

Consultation, 1906

Käthe Kollwitz

Run Over, 1910, published 1924

Käthe Kollwitz

The Volunteers, 1921-1922

Käthe Kollwitz

Memorial for Karl Liebknecht, 1920

Käthe Kollwitz

Seated Woman with Shawl, ca. 1924

Käthe Kollwitz

City Outskirts, 1901

More objects +

Exhibition Checklist

A Process of Protest : Prints and Drawings of Käthe Kollwitz

July 28 - November 26, 2006
View Checklist PDF

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