Käthe Kollwitz: Prints, Process, Politics

This collection explores Kollwitz's most creative years, examining her sequences of images, with a focus on the tension between making and meaning.

German printmaker K the Kollwitz (1867-1945) is known for her unapologetic social and political imagery; her representations of grief, suffering, and struggle; and her equivocal ideas about artistic and political labels. This volume explores Kollwitz's obsessive printmaking experiments with the evolution of her images, and assesses the unusually rich progressions of preparatory drawings, proofs, and rejected images behind Kollwitz's compositions of struggling workers, rebellious peasants, and grieving
mothers.

This selected catalogue of the Dr. Richard A. Simms collection at the Getty Research Institute provides a bird's-eye view of Kollwitz's sequences of images as well as the interrelationships among prints produced over multiple years. The meanings and sentiments emerging from Kollwitz's images are not, as is often implied, unmediated expressions of her politics and emotions. Rather, Kollwitz transformed images with deliberate technical and formal experiments, seemingly endless adjustments, wholesale rejections, and strategic regroupings of figures and forms--all of which demonstrate that her obsessive dedication to making art was never a straightforward means to political or emotional ends.

This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the Getty Research Institute at the Getty Center December 3, 2019, to March 29, 2020 and at the Art Institute of Chicago May 30 to September 13, 2020.

Louis Marchesano is former curator of prints and drawings at the Getty Research Institute, and now the Audrey and William H. Helfand Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.