MOTHERS’
ARMS: KÄTHE KOLLWITZ’S WOMEN AND WAR
Käthe
Kollwitz
Smith
Museum of Art, through May 29, 2016
 |
| The Mothers |
Aristophanes’ ancient Greek comedy of Lysistrata is so often performed that
you may have seen it. Its humor—drawing upon the social values of Antiquity—derives
from Lysistrata’s unique strategy for ending warfare: rally women to deny sex
to men until the fighting stops. German artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) tried
a different tactic: shame. The Smith College Museum of Art features a selection
of her paintings, drawings, lithographs, graphics, and sculptures, nearly all
of which touch upon themes of social justice—poverty, class oppression, and the
ravages of war, as seen through the eyes women, especially mothers.
 |
| The Peasants War |
Kollwitz was born into the bourgeois comfort of a
religious Prussian family, but she quickly left it behind and embraced her
grandmother’s socialism. A sense of loss permeates much of her work, perhaps
induced by her brother’s early death, and enhanced by marrying and having two
sons while still in her twenties. Socialism certainly influenced early efforts
that gained notice: her 1898 series titled The
Weavers, which commemorated an 1842 Silesian strike; and her homage to the
16th century Peasants War,
completed in 1908. In each case, Kollwitz was drawn to both the plight of the
poor and to the deep loss felt by mothers whose young children suffered and
whose older ones became combatants and casualties.
World War I deepened her anguish and left her heartbroken;
her son Peter perished in the conflict. Although she was recognized as a
leading voice in German art and co-founded the Women’s Art Association, the chaos
and deprivations of the Weimar Republic led her deeper into the pacifist fold.
If you will, they made her into an artistic Lysistrata committed to the idea
that war was futile as an agent of social change and a form of male aggression
that repressed women and children.
Many of Kollwitz’s works have a Pieta-like quality, with ordinary women supplanting the Madonna and
offering final succor to dying husbands, sons, neighbors, and each other. The
latter is not to be overlooked—log before second wave feminists spoke of
communities of women, Kollwitz depicted them in mutual embraces that evoked a
sense of building a mass-bodied shell against the external realm of pain.
Sometimes they bear their children like offerings that will not go into the
basket, as in her 1924 poster The
Survivors: Fight War, not Wars; sometimes the women huddle back to back but
with eyes gazing outward as in the powerful woodcut The Mothers (1923).
Of Kollwitz’s works, her woodcuts and sculptures made the
most impression upon me—there is an ineffable sadness in their solidity and the
somber tones of rock and black or sepia ink. The woodcuts in particular invoke
the heavy outlining of Georges Rouault and the profound emotions of German
expressionists such as Max Beckman, yet with a perspective that it is
identifiably female. Still other evocations include Tahitian statuary and the
Depression era portraits of Dorothea Lange.
 |
| The Sacrifice |
Kollwitz merged her art with her social conscious and
became known as an outspoken opponent of militarism. This, of course, failed to
endear her to the Nazi regime that came to power in the 1930s. Her art was
removed from museum walls--though luckily not destroyed as “degenerate art”—and
she was forced to resign as head of the Women’s Art Association. In a profound irony,
she died on April 22, 1945, just 16 days before World War II ended. It is,
though, fitting that her art lives on long whereas that failed painter, Adolph
Hitler, endures only in infamy.
Of course, another distressing irony lies in the fact
that somehow Kollwitz’s pieces at Smith—some of whom are now more than a
hundred years old—feel so profoundly relevant for our own time of military
conflict. Change a few costumes and it could be Syria. Or Afghanistan. Or Ferguson,
Missouri. See this exhibit. And weep for humankind.
Rob
Weir
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