Born in 1867 to a father who was a radical social democrat who became a mason and house builder and educated by her grandfather on matters of religion and socialism Kathe Kollwitz dedicated her life to political activism. From an early age she was confronted by death when her younger brother died, leaving her deeply affected.
Her fathers encouragement beginning at the age of 12 saw her progress artistically until she was old enough to go the Womens School of Art in Berlin , at a time when women were not allowed to study like men. At the age of 17 she got engaged to a medical student Karl Kollwitz whom she would not marry until 1891 when he was a qualified doctor. In the years in between she studied at Munich womans art school, discovering there that she was a more talented draftsman than painter, then she returned to her home and rented a studio where she continued to draw Germany s working class laborers.
Two of her greatest works were The Weavers: an etching cycle inspired by the oppression of Silesian Weavers in Langembielau and their ultimately unsuccessful buy violent revolt in 1842, and The Peasant War: and etching cycle equally inspired by a violent revolution this time in southern Germany during the early years of the reformation when, in 1525, the peasants took arms against the feudal lords of the church who treated them as slaves.
During WWI she lost her one of her sons to the fighting and lost a grandson to WWII. All throughout her life she was a pacifist and produced anti-war art. She provided prints for the left-wing publications of pre-Nazi Germany and during the power struggle which followed the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II sought to ally the workers with the communist Soviets.
When the strongly anti-communist Nazis came to power they banned her from exhibiting and stripped her of her teaching post at the Berlin Academy of Art. Despite all this she stayed in Germany . She left Berlin in 1943, and during the latter days of the war her house was destroyed by an allied bomb, taking with it the majority of her work, all except a small portfolio she took with her.
In 1932 she finally finished her monument to the son she had lost in 1914: sculptures called The Grieving Parents. She was the first woman to be elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts. She died in 1945 in Moritzburg.
Works: The Weavers
Peasant War
Death and Woman
Death Woman and Child
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