THE DICKENS OF PRINTMAKING
KÄTHE KOLLWITZ PRINTS: DEFENDING THE
DOWNTRODDEN
On View
at the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine
From February 24, 2007 to May 27, 2007
Reviewed by Laurie Meunier Graves
March
4, 2007
As I’ve
noted before, in Maine, March is a funny, in-between kind of month. The
holidays are over, the tourists haven’t even begun to think of coming back,
and the entire state seems to be waiting for one stage to end and another to
begin. The skies are often gray, and the snow alternates between being soft
and slushy and crunchy and hard. As if reflecting this indeterminate state,
the art exhibits in Maine this time of year often have a tentative, casual
quality to them, and they almost feel like afterthoughts, as much a duty as
anything else.
Nowhere
is this more apparent than in the Portland Museum of Art’s current
exhibition of Käthe Kollwitz Prints: Defending the Downtrodden.
Tucked on the fourth floor in a narrow balcony of a gallery, this
exhibition, with little accompanying literature, has the forlorn air of a
neglected child. And what a shame! Käthe Kollwitz was a first-rate artist,
and her work is definitely worth seeing, even when there are only twenty-two
pieces on display. My husband and I drove over an hour to get to the museum,
and afterward I was not sorry I had made the trip to see these dark, grim,
powerful prints.
Käthe
(Schmidt) Kollwitz, born in 1867 in
Königsberg, East Prussia (now
Kaliningrad, Russia), came from a liberal middle-class family who supported
her interest in art. According to the National Museum of Women in the Arts
(Washington, D.C.).“By age 14 [Kollwitz] was taking private classes with
local artists, since the Königsberg Academy barred female pupils. She later
studied in Munich and Berlin.” She married Karl Kollwitz, a doctor, and they
lived in a poor, working-class section of Berlin, where he also had his
office. As a result, Käthe Kollwitz become interested in printmaking as a
way of chronicling the lives of the poor, past and present, whose situations
were made even harder by the callousness of the ruling class or, worse yet,
war. This interest in “the downtrodden” aroused the animosity of Kaiser
Wilhelm, who saw to it that she didn’t receive a gold medal at the Berlin
Salon. Years later, the Nazis didn’t like her any better. They banned her
art and forced her to resign from the Prussian Academy, where she was a
professor and the first woman to have been appointed (in 1919). Finally,
Kollwitz personally understood the grief that war brings—a son was killed in
the First World War and a grandson in the Second World War.
It is
not difficult to understand why the Kaiser and the Nazis didn’t like
Kollwitz’s art. When great talent is combined with an antiauthoritarian
message, people are bound to take notice, and tyrants are bound to take
offense, labeling the work as “too subversive.” In a series called The
Peasants’ Wars, a man yoked to a plow strains as he pulls; a raped woman
lies splayed among flowers and cabbages; a swirl of people, with faces like
skulls, surge down a stone stairway; a stooped woman (Black Anna) exhorts
her fellow peasants to fight against the wealthy landowners. This is not
exactly art to comfort the powers-that-be.
The
most powerful print in this exhibition is The Widow. In this woodcut,
rendered with thick, strong lines, a woman, stretched across the picture, is
flat on her back with a limp baby draped across her chest. According to one
description I’ve read, the mother is “grieving.” However, with her stiff
feet and face and outstretched neck, she looks more dead than alive. Indeed,
the woman’s face has the same blank look that the dead have in Matthew
Brady’s Civil War photographs.
However, my favorite piece in this exhibit is a softer picture, a charcoal
drawing on paper, a self-portrait. With just the barest, most delicate
outline, Kollwitz manages to convey herself. It is a little masterpiece that
shows how much can be done with a line that is under great but gentle
control. In this exhibit there are other fine self-portraits, sad and sober,
but somehow this one with its will-o’-the-wisp lines moved me the most. It
spoke to me of artistic possibilities averted by a not-so-civilized Germany
and Europe. All artists, of course, are shaped by their times, but Kollwitz,
in particular, was affected by hers, and, with this self-portrait, we get a
glimpse of the direction her art might have taken had she lived in a better
era.
I hope
Mainers who are within driving distance will make the effort to see the work
of this enormously talented woman who struggled against the confines of her
gender to become successful, only to run afoul of repressive regimes who
wanted to silence her. And maybe, if we are very lucky, there will someday
be a larger exhibit featuring Käthe Kollwitz’s work.
