Käthe Kollwitz

A pair of hands, veined with the ravages of endless work and persistent empathy, gesture towards the viewer in Käthe Kollwitz’s untitled study (ca. 1905). While their palms and knuckles are positioned as if reaching for something out of frame, their fingers subtly curl inward in a grasping motion, their wrists and forearms are angled enough for the audience to infer that they are encircled rather than outstretched. While we cannot see what the hands of Untitled hold, Kollwitz contorts them into an uncomfortable pose that would force the model to hunch their shoulder and painfully jut their elbow into their ribcage. After staring for a few moments, it becomes apparent that the hands of Untitled caress babies, whose absence is either a stylistic choice or a simple yet devastating signifier of loss.

As an artist, Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) defied classification. While some of her works feature Christian iconography, she largely deviated from her Symbolist contemporaries by developing her own allegorical language from literary sources like Gerhart Hauptmann’s The Weavers and Wilhelm Zimmermann’s The History of the Great Peasant War, applying their historical frameworks to late nineteenth and early twentieth century Germany’s sociopolitical landscape. Her approach and chosen subjects were also shaped by her Socialist politics, austere childhood, and, after 1914, the death of her son Peter in World War I. Kollwitz synthesized this metaphorical lexicon with the visual and thematic throughlines she plumbed throughout her career, all viewed through the lens of inequity, systemic poverty and war’s cruel, indiscriminate consequences.

Käthe Kollwitz, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2024. Courtesy Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Jonathan Dorado.">

Hands bear the emotional weight in many of Kollwitz’s works and function beyond the artist’s instruments—as the communities that lay groundwork for revolution, as a mother’s sole means of protection and connection with her children, and as metaphysical channels. The Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective Käthe Kollwitz, the artist’s long overdue New York City major debut, is both a technical and thematic wonder suffused with the artist’s fury and the overwhelming pathos of her work. The exhibition examines both the piecemeal ways in which Kollwitz produced her works and the recurrent nature of her motifs, including, of course, hands.

Woman With Dead Child, State I (1903), a skeletal suggestion of a grieving woman clutching the corpse of her child tightly enough for their forms to merge, makes tangible what Untitled only implies. The only semi-rendered element of the print, made prominent by the drawing’s overwhelming negative space, is the mother’s right hand gripping her son’s right shoulder. Though Kollwitz renders her subject’s facial expression lightly, the hand’s expertly blocked values and pronounced knuckles fully convey the subject’s desperation and despondency.

The exhibition displays Woman with Dead Child’s subsequent iterations leading up to State VIII, affording audiences a glimpse into Kollwitz’s process-based methodology, and presenting Kollwitz’s creativity as cyclical. We see the subject’s gnarled knee emerge in State II, increased values play across the mother’s face and the child’s skull form in State III, textured hashes marked by immediacy blanket State IV, and State V incorporates highlights and an experimental blue wash, which was then replaced with a gold backdrop and more precise linework in State VI. These versions culminate in State VIII, the fully balanced and realized print. Though State VIII invites the viewer to take a closer look at the mother’s face, lined with anguish, only her forehead and closed eyes are visible, and her hand, desperately clutching what is left of her child, remains at the print’s forefront.

Woman with Dead Child (Frau mit totem Kind), State IV, 1903. Line etching, drypoint, and sandpaper, with imprint of laid paper and Ziegler’s transfer paper, overworked with charcoal and blue wash, heightened with white, 16 5/16 × 18 ⅝ inches. Image © Yale University Art Gallery. Courtesy Museum of Modern Art.">

Kollwitz’s occasional excursions into the characteristic imagery of Symbolism introduce hands as a conduit between the living and spectral. In Death (1893–97), the second plate from Kollwitz’s “A Weavers’ Revolt” series, the anthropomorphic skeleton of Death personified, dramatically illuminated by glowing candlelight, stretches an arm toward a languishing peasant woman. Kollwitz returned to this motif thirty years later in her self-portrait Call of Death (1937), in which Death’s disembodied hand, now fleshy, taps the shoulder of a seated Kollwitz, her face hallowed with age and exhaustion. Unlike the peasant woman, whose arms hang limply at her sides in resignation, Kollwitz’s own arm is bent and outstretched in mid-conversation, indicating her refusal to accept her outcome, regardless of its inevitability.

When Kollwtiz penned an open letter in response to writer Richard Dehmel’s call for German youth to enlist in World War I as Germany faced imminent defeat, she invoked her favorite poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “Seed for the planting must not be ground.” Though the quote initially appeared in Wilhelm Meister to distinguish knowledge from innate artistic ability, Kollwitz’s intended meaning is clear: the fate of a nation rests in our hands, through the act of protecting our children.