Vassar College Only U.S. Site for Rare Käthe Kollwitz Drawings

A new exhibition of the work of one of the 20th century's most revered artists, Käthe Kollwitz, including 30 rarely seen drawings on exceptional loan from the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, will be on view at Vassar College's Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center from October 3 to December 14, 2003. The Art Center is the only U.S. venue for the exhibition.

Käthe Kollwitz: The Art of Compassion features 72 drawings and prints and 5 sculptures by Kollwitz (1867-1945), grouped to emphasize the primacy of drawing in her artistic process, as well as the continuity of her subject matter and themes. The exhibition was organized and circulated by the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, under the direction of Brenda Rix, Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings.

"Kollwitz was an astonishing draftsman of Old Master technical accomplishment and Modernist boldness and power," said Patricia Phagan, the Philip and Lynn Straus Curator of Prints and Drawings, who organized the exhibition for the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center. "She concentrated throughout her career on the human figure—especially the female, working-class figure—as a vehicle for themes of motherhood, oppression, death, war and sacrifice. Her stirring treatments of these themes, and her extraordinary personal integrity, have inspired generations of artists."

Vassar will also present a small companion exhibition drawn from its permanent collection, Views of Women: Prints in Germany, 1880-1905, of etchings and woodcuts by Kollwitz and her contemporaries Edvard Munch, Max Klinger, Peter Behrens, and Franz von Stück. "Women stand out as powerful symbols and beloved companions in these pieces," said Phagan. "There are also some striking contrasts between how Kollwitz and her male counterparts portrayed women."

Käthe Kollwitz: The Art of Compassion is presented at Vassar in three main sections. The first includes studies of models, early scenes inspired by literature (such as At the Church Wall, from Goethe's Faust) and Kollwitz's first important print series, A Weavers' Rebellion (1893-97). The second section is devoted to her print series Peasants' War (1905-08) and to works evoking the suffering and upheaval of the First World War and its aftermath. The third section, with drawings and prints from the 1890s through the 1930s, concentrates on the recurring themes of motherhood and death.

Outstanding drawings from the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart are included throughout the exhibition, and illuminate important linkages between Kollwitz's drawings and prints. One sheet, Self-Portrait with Nude Studies (1900), disconcertingly superimposes a finely rendered profile of Kollwitz across the supine body of a naked woman, with jottings nearby that likely document when the woman modeled for the artist. Self-Portrait with Nude Studies eventually served in the making of the exhibition's large allegorical drawing Life (1900), a tripartite composition that Kollwitz initially considered for her series A Weavers' Rebellion.

Other notable drawings from Stuttgart include a sweetly observant Head and Hands of a Sleeping Boy (1903), a study of her son Peter used in developing the print Pietà; the rough, almost unbearably expressive Death Tearing Child from Its Mother (c. 1911); and a study in bold charcoal strokes for the celebrated poster Never Again War! (1923/24).

The Art Gallery of Ontario was the only other venue for the exhibition, which is being presented at Vassar College with the generous support of the Smart Family Foundation, Inc.

"Vassar is known for the excellence of its print collection," according to Phagan. "Our holdings range from the magnificent Old Master sheets of the donation from Mrs. Felix Warburg and her children, to the color-filled, playful stencil prints of Matisse's Jazz Portfolio, a gift from Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, III (Blanchette Hooker, class of 1931). We feel honored that the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and Art Gallery of Ontario have recognized one of our great strengths by welcoming us as a venue."

ABOUT KOLLWITZ

Käthe Kollwitz was born in 1867 in Königsberg, East Prussia, as Käthe Schmidt, the granddaughter of Julius Rupp, the founder of the liberal Protestant Free Religious Congregation and the daughter of Karl Schmidt, a member of Germany's Social Democratic Party. Encouraged by her father to become an artist, she trained with private teachers (since women were not admitted into the official art academies) and at seventeen went to Berlin to study at the Berlin Women's Art Union. Her teacher in Berlin, Karl Stauffer-Bern, recognized her exceptional talent for drawing and encouraged her to focus on drawing and printmaking.

In 1891, she married Karl Kollwitz, a medical doctor and social democrat. The couple moved into a tenement district of Berlin, where Karl Kollwitz worked as a physician for a health insurance concern for the tailors' guild, and Käthe Kollwitz observed at first hand the lives of the urban poor, especially women. She showed her work publicly in Berlin for the first time in 1893, at the Berlin Academy's annual Great Berlin Art Exhibition. In 1898, she returned to this exhibition with her print series A Weavers' Rebellion. The jury voted her a gold medal, which the Minister of Culture and Emperor Wilhelm II subsequently refused to award, on the grounds that her work was objectionable in its unsentimental subject matter and gritty style, and that she was a woman.

Kollwitz won increasing recognition over the next years, receiving a commission in 1903 from the Society for Historical Art for the series Peasants' War, winning the Villa Romana Prize in 1907 for study in Florence, and making drawings in 1909 and 1910 for the satirical magazine Simplicissimus. In 1919, after the establishment of the Republic, she became the first woman to be appointed a professor at the Berlin Academy of Art, which admitted female students by that time. But she had been profoundly affected by the First World War, which had claimed the life of her son Peter, and throughout the 1920s she devoted much of her energy to making art that addressed immediate social and political issues. As a memorial to Peter, she created sculptures of mourning parents, which were installed in 1932 in Belgium, where he had died.

With the rise to power of the Nazis, Kollwitz was forced out of the Berlin Academy and threatened with deportation to a concentration camp. She began her last print series, Death, in 1934. Her husband Karl died in 1940; her grandson Peter was killed in combat in 1942. Kollwitz left Berlin the following year and ultimately found refuge outside Dresden in a small house that was offered to her by Prince Ernst Heinrich of Saxony. She died there in April 1945, only a few weeks before the Nazi surrender.

"Some day a new ideal will arise and there will be an end of all wars," she said at the time of her death. "People will have to work hard for that new state of things, but they will achieve it."

ABOUT FRANCES LEHMAN LOEB ART CENTER

Admission to the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center is free. The Art Center is open to the public Tuesday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., and Sunday. 1-5 p.m. Located at the entrance to the historic Vassar College campus, the Art Center can be reached within minutes from other Mid-Hudson cultural attractions, such as the new Dia:Beacon. The Art Center is wheelchair accessible. For more information, the public may call (845) 437-5632 or visit fllac.vassar.edu.

Vassar College is a highly selective, coeducational, independent, residential liberal arts college founded in 1861.

Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations or information on accessibility should contact Campus Activities Office at (845) 437-5370. Without sufficient notice, appropriate space and/or assistance may not be available.

Vassar College is a highly selective, coeducational, independent, residential liberal arts college founded in 1861.

This article was posted on Friday, October 3rd, 2003.