Deborah Wye, Artists and Prints: Masterworks from The Museum of Modern Art, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2004, p. 93

Käthe Kollwitz devoted herself to depicting the social and political injustices she witnessed in Germany during the tumultuous periods surrounding World Wars I and II. Trained at the School for Women Artists in Berlin during the 1880s, she turned to printmaking early in her career, feeling that it was the medium most befitting social criticism. During her lifetime, she made two hundred sixty prints, including etchings, lithographs, and woodcuts, some of which were used as poster compositions for various social causes.

The Parents is one from a series of woodcuts about World War I, a popular subject for many artists' print portfolios. Her series continued a tradition of apocalyptic print cycles that, in Europe, reaches back to the sixteenth century. Rather than depicting its violence, however, Kollwitz chose to focus on the emotional damage inflicted on the home front, especially on the women who lose sons, husbands, and brothers. Kollwitz herself never recovered from the death of her son Peter who, only months after joining the German army, was killed in combat in 1914.

Five years after his death, finding herself dissatisfied with lithography, Kollwitz experimented with the woodcut medium, hoping to find a print technique with which she could convey her grief, as well as strengthen and simplify her images. Searching for universal icons for the devastation imposed by war, she exploited the woodcut's inherent qualities to express the raw agony of war on the human psyche, slashing and gouging the wood to heighten the emotional impact of her images, and often silhouetting her black figures against the stark white smoothness of unprinted paper.

Harper Montgomery