Käthe Kollwitz was 47 when her 18-year-old son, Peter, was killed on Flanders Fields, in 1914. The grieving mother began using her platform as one of Germany’s most celebrated artists, noted for her masterful drawing and printmaking, to become one of its most outspoken pacifists. In 1918, when a newspaper article written by the poet Richard Dehmel called for more German troops to be sent to the Western Front, Kollwitz responded with an open letter begging for an end to the Great War and the loss of any more human life.
“Seed corn must not be ground,” Kollwitz wrote in the same letter, taking inspiration from a line by Goethe. Come 1941, amid a second World War, the artist returned to this theme to make one of her last works of art, a crayon lithograph entitled Seed for Sowing Should Not Be Milled. The print, which depicts an old woman—Kollwitz died four years later at the age of 77—enveloping three boys in a protective mantle, is one of the highlights of “Käthe Kollwitz,” a timely retrospective opening at New York’s Museum of Modern Art on March 31.
“Käthe Kollwitz” happens to be one of three major museum retrospectives on the artist scheduled for this year. One is already underway at the Städel Museum, in Frankfurt, while another debuts at the Statens Museum for Kunst, in Copenhagen, on November 7. The MoMA exhibition is the first major Kollwitz survey to open in the United States in more than 30 years, and the first ever to be held in New York, according to its curator, Starr Figura. “One thing I have been struck by is how many people today actually have never heard of Kollwitz,” Figura tells me, “even though she is one of the greatest graphic artists in the history of art.”
This was not always true. “Interestingly, her work was extremely popular in the United States from the 1930s through the 1970s and 1980s,” Figura says. One of the most notable Kollwitz works in the MoMA show is a poster she made in 1924, commemorating 10 years since the outbreak of World War I. It features an androgynous activist with one arm raised against a white background on which are crayoned the words “Nie Wieder Krieg” (Never Again War). The image was co-opted by protesters of the Vietnam War; they replaced the German writing with red letters in English.
Figura believes that the renewed institutional attention to Kollwitz’s work has “to do with a combination of museums going back and recovering women artists, as well as just the incredible resonance and relevance that her work has today.” The MoMA show also focuses on the impact Kollwitz’s art of grievance and activism had on 20th-century Black artists, such as Faith Ringgold and Kerry James Marshall, while also examining her iconic status in her native Germany.
An audio guide to the exhibition, featuring different artists and writers, includes a trenchant analysis by the German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans. “He talks about how children in Germany learn about Kollwitz in their history books, even before they learn about her in an art book,” Figura says. “She is a central figure in recent German history who transcends her role as an artist through her work as a role model and a humanitarian.”
“Käthe Kollwitz” opens at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, on March 31
Tobias Grey is a Gloucestershire, U.K.–based writer and critic, focused on art, film, and books