Curator, Starr Figura: After World War I, Kollwitz decided she was going to make her third major print portfolio. What you have is a sequence of seven woodcuts and they move from images of a mother sacrificing a child and young boys rushing off to war, to then parents grieving, and then widows grieving. And then towards the end, you have this image of the mothers embracing each other together and protecting their children.
Artist, Wolfgang Tillmans: The first World War was the first time industrial means of killing were employed. This idea that civilized neighbors, who share a common European culture, would commit such bloodshed was an absolute shock.
Käthe Kollwitz puts all the focus on the loss that women are suffering as a consequence of war. That is something that warmongers always want people not to think about, the misery that is left behind.
Starr Figura: With that portfolio, she decided to try woodcut because it was so bold and dark. She said, “Pain is completely black.”
Printmaker, Rob Swainston: I think she’s choosing this medium because there’s such an urgency to the issue, and woodcut just conveys urgency. The white lines that you see—that's the width of the tool. Those lines are just kind of hacked. This is a piece of wood and it's physical and it actually resists you. There’s the sparsity of what she's carving, if you look at how much black space is there, it’s just really pared down to what Käthe Kollwitz says is essential for us to see.