ArtistGerman
Käthe Kollwitz
0 active items
Few artists have made suffering as visible as Käthe Kollwitz did. Working in etching, lithography, woodcut, and eventually sculpture, she spent five decades translating the lives of the poor and the grief of mothers into images that refuse to look away. Born in 1867 in Königsberg, Prussia, she was the daughter of a Social Democrat mason who recognised her talent early and sent her to study under Karl Stauffer-Bern in Berlin. She married a doctor, Karl Kollwitz, who ran a clinic in one of the city's poorest districts. That address shaped everything that followed.
Her first major cycle, A Weavers' Revolt (1893-1897), was inspired by Gerhart Hauptmann's play about the failed 1844 uprising of Silesian textile workers. Six etchings and lithographs traced the arc from misery to doomed resistance. The Peasant War (1902-1908) followed, seven etchings depicting the crushed German peasant uprising of 1524-1525. These works established Kollwitz as the leading graphic artist of the German left - not through ideology but through the weight of her figures, the darkness that pressed in from the edges of her compositions.
The death of her youngest son Peter at the Western Front in 1914 broke something open in her work. Her response, spread across decades, was a sustained meditation on maternal grief. The War woodcut cycle (1921-1922) compressed that grief into eight sheets. Her sculpture The Parents (1932), installed at the German war cemetery in Vladslo, Belgium, where Peter is buried, shows two kneeling figures that have become among the most visited anti-war monuments in Europe.
Kollwitz was the first woman elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts and the first to hold a professorship there, appointed in 1919. In 1929 she received the Order Pour le Merite for Science and Art, again as the first woman recipient. When the National Socialists came to power in 1933, she was forced to resign her position and barred from exhibiting. She continued working in private until her death on 22 April 1945, just days before the war's end.
At auction, Kollwitz works appear primarily in the prints and graphic category, which matches the 17 of 23 items in this database falling under Prints and Engravings. Works have sold through Bukowskis Stockholm, Grisebach, and Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner among others. Notable hammer prices in this dataset include a Modre med barn at 17,000 NOK, a Help Russia poster at 16,000 NOK, and a Female nude from the back at 11,250 CHF. Globally, her print market is large and active, with auction records across thousands of lots and a single work reaching over 1.1 million USD in 2022.