Director, Glenn Lowry: World War I devastated Germany, killing and wounding nearly severn million. Its political, economic, and psychological effects continued to reverberate for many years afterward. To confront these stark realities, artists like Käthe Kollwitz often turned to black and white printmaking. In this portfolio, War, published in 1923, Kollwitz commemorates the sacrifices and the suffering of the women, parents, and children left behind.
Curator, Starr Figura: There are seven woodcuts in all. Two of them are titled The Widow. In one of them we see a woman who appears to be pregnant, hugging herself, and in the second image of The Widow, perhaps it's the same woman, she's flat out on the ground with a baby, slumped over her. It's possible that they've both died from starvation.
The only print in this series that shows actual combatants is called The Volunteers. And in it we see a death figure leading off a troop of boys, one of whom is Kollwitz's own son Peter, who volunteered to serve in the war at the very beginning, and was killed in action two months later. And that loss was something that Kollwitz was never really able to recover from. And so the grief that is expressed in this portfolio was extremely personal for her, and she wanted it to serve as a testament to the devastation of war, and sent it out on tour to a number of German cities in order to get that message across.