Portrait

Käthe Kollwitz's composition depicts two older people in an indefinite space, sitting motionless, eyes downcast and arms folded, preoccupied with their thoughts. Suffering and despair are visible on their skinny, battered faces with bags under their eyes. In this dramatic way, Kollwitz depicted the emotions and feelings of parents after the loss of a child. The stimulus was the artist's family situation - her younger son, Peter, was killed in Flanders at the front of the First World War in October 1914. In the same year, Kollwitz began work on a sculpture, the memorial Parents in Mourning, completed in 1932. The work, in which the parents have self-portrait features, originally stood in the military cemetery in Roggenwalde, Flanders, and was moved to the German military cemetery in Vladslo in 1958.The graphic was made in 1919 using the crayon lithography technique, reflected on paper and signed in pencil.Käthe Kollwitz, née Schmidt, was born in 1867 in Königsberg, East Prussia, and died in 1945 in Moritzburg, Saxony. She studied painting and drawing at the school run by the Berlin Artists' Association. She continued her painting studies in Munich. She was significantly influenced by Max Klinger's work Leben (Life) Opus VIII. She initially worked in her atelier in Königsberg. She married a doctor, Karl Kollwitz, and moved to Berlin. Her first graphic attempts in Königsberg culminated in the dramatic cycle Ein Weberaufstand (The Rise of the Weavers). Kollwitz was an extremely talented, innovative sculptor and graphic artist. Her expressionist works dealt with themes reflecting the condition of society, denouncing the injustice of capitalist relations, especially women's dramatic fate. They were also a protest against the war. In 1919, the artist was the first woman to be elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts.

Ewa Gwiazdowska