Käthe Kollwitz

German (1867–1945)
Soldiers’ Wives Waving Good-Bye, 1930s
Bronze
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.     71.2006
© 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Käthe Kollwitz worked in Berlin during the turbulent and increasingly troubled decades leading up to World War II.  In her prints, drawings, and rare sculptures such as Soldiers’ Wives Waving Good-Bye, she focused on the economic misery and political despair of the German lower classes, especially women.  She was the first woman to be elected to the Prussian Academy of Art in 1919, but her stridently anti-Fascist politics eventually led to harassment by the Nazis.  She was ultimately forbidden to exhibit her work.

Produced mostly in the 1930s and early 1940s, Kollwitz’s bronze sculptures often feature blocky masses of people, suggesting a broad commonality of suffering.  She herself was no stranger to suffering: she lost both a son and grandson in World War I.  As seen in the sculpture here, where peasant women weep as their men depart for battle and possible death, her art radiates an intense empathy for the powerless and dispossessed.