War, Kollwitz’s third print portfolio, memorializes the anguish of those who lost sons, husbands, and fathers in World War I. Its sequence mirrors Kollwitz’s evolution from war supporter to pacifist as she coped with the death of her own son in the conflict. “[This series] is my confrontation with that part of my life, from 1914 to 1918, and these four years were difficult to reckon with,” she wrote. The first two sheets portray a mother holding her infant as if offering a sacrifice, and a band of volunteers marching ecstatically to battle. Subsequent sheets shift to parents and widows grieving their losses. One of the final sheets depicts mothers protecting children—an image of resistance against Germany's culture of military sacrifice.
Gallery label from Käthe Kollwitz, March 31–July 20, 2024
These woodcuts—stark icons of concentrated emotion—focus on the anguish suffered by wives, parents, and children whose men fought and died in the war. In The Sacrifice a new mother offers up her infant as a sacrifice to the cause. In The Widow II a woman and her baby lie in a heap, perhaps dead from starvation. Volunteers is the only print to show combatants. In it, Kollwitz's son Peter takes his place next to Death, who leads a band of young men in an ecstatic procession off to war. Peter had been killed in action two months after joining the military, in 1914, a loss from which Kollwitz never fully recovered.
Gallery label from German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse, March 27–July 11, 2011
These prints express the raw agony that war inflicts on humanity. In The Widow I a woman hugs herself in anguish. Her rounded form and the tender contact of her massive hands over her chest and abdomen suggest that she may be pregnant, lending further poignancy to her situation. In The Mothers, a group of women locked in tight embrace console each other, while two frightened children peer out from beneath their protective huddle. In The Volunteers, four young men, whose distressed faces and clenched fists betray their sense of doom yet determination, volunteer to fight as they follow a drumming figure with a deathlike mask. Grief and torment pervade each of these images, so graphically conveyed by the crude slashes and gouges of the woodcut medium.
Kollwitz's Seven Woodcuts about War is one of several portfolios of prints by German artists focusing on the savagery of World War I. But rather than show the brutalities of warfare and bombing experienced by soldiers, the artist portrays the emotional responses of civilians. Although her sense of loss was very personal—her younger son Peter was killed in combat in Flanders—Kollwitz presents universal visions of the unending sorrow generated by war for those left behind.
Publication excerpt from The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 113.
In 1919, Käthe Kollwitz began work on Krieg (War), her response to the tragedies endured during what she called those "unspeakably difficult years" of World War I and its aftermath. The portfolio's seven woodcuts focus on the sorrows of those left behind—mothers, widows, and children. Kollwitz had struggled to find the appropriate means of expression until she saw an exhibition of Ernst Barlach's woodcuts in 1920. Revising each print through as many as nine preparatory drawings and states, Kollwitz radically simplified the compositions. The large-format, stark black-and-white woodcuts feature women left to face their grief and fears alone, with their partners, or with each other.
Only one print, Die Freiwilligen (The volunteers), shows the combatants. In it, Kollwitz's younger son, Peter, takes his place next to Death, who leads the troops in an ecstatic procession to war. Peter was killed in action just two months later. Kollwitz wanted these works to be widely viewed. By eliminating references to a specific time or place, she created universally legible indictments of the real sacrifices demanded in exchange for abstract concepts of honor and glory. The prints were exhibited in 1924 at the newly founded International Anti-War Museum in Berlin.
Publication excerpt from Heather Hess, German Expressionist Digital Archive Project, German Expressionism: Works from the Collection. 2011
