Author Description

This is the first biography in English of the remarkable German artist Kathe Kollwitz. For more than 60 years Kollwitz expressed through her work the ideas that obsessed the plight of the oppressed, the causes of peace and social justice, the joys and sorrows of motherhood, and the mystery of death. Married in her youth to a doctor, who bore him two songs, one of whom was killed in World War I. Her earliest major success..a series of prints called 'Weavers,' based on a revolt of Silesian weavers as dramatized in a play by Gerhart Hauptmann...caused her to become known as the 'socialist artist.'She continued all her life in her social concerns, and in World War I produced some of her most powerful works to express her anti-war feelings. Nevertheless, her outward life was not untypical of an ordinary housewife, and it is from her experience as a mother that much of her most expressive work was formed. Her last years were spent in the nightmare of Hitler's Germany where she was forbidden to teach and where her work was labeled 'degenerate.'This book brings together her life and art, showing through reproductions of her drawings, etchings, woodcuts, lithographs, and sculpture how each contributes toward and understanding of this complex woman, one of our century's most moving artists.