GERMAN artist Kathe Kollwitz (1867-1945) was steeped in progressive politics and culture from childhood.

Her grandfather and father were socialists and her own lifelong conviction was reaffirmed through meeting the patients of her husband, Doctor Karl Kollwitz, in a working-class district of Berlin.
She managed to combine motherhood with a successful career as a teacher and artist without compromising her social and political beliefs.

Kollwitz had a traditional academic art education, in which oil paining topped the hierarchy of mediums, but she committed to printmaking because this better served her central aim of producing cheaply accessible works.

“It is all right with me that my work serves a purpose. I want to have an effect on my time,” she said. So she stuck to readily legible realist styles, despite the avant-garde experimentation as an end in itself then being highly prized in progressive circles.

Yet her socially or politically committed subjects and their stylistic expressiveness absolutely spoke of their times.  

Kollwitz’s father was a stonemason and she took a similar no-nonsense, physical attitude to her work. Primarily a printmaker, she literally carved lines into coarse grained slabs of wood or painstakingly scratched them into unforgiving metal etching plates.

She attacked the lithographic stone with a greasy lithographic crayon with energetically fluid lines to convey meaning through method as much as subject. And, perhaps with a silent nod to her father, she turned to sculpture in later life.

A fundamental influence was Emile Zola’s socially committed realist novels and scenes from his1885 novel Germinal, exposing the miner’s poverty and inhumane working conditions, were among her earliest works.  

Often working in series, Kollwitz addressed the themes of poverty, protest and resistance to political and social injustice, especially as these affected women and children, throughout her life.

Her first major etchings series, A Weavers’ Rebellion (1893-98), was  based on Gerhard Hauptmann’s play about the Silesian weavers’ strike in 1844. Stressing their solidarity, one print depicts angry women tearing up cobbles to hurl at a rich millowner’s gate.

In another, as in a frieze, the weavers march grimly onwards with collective determination, clutching what tools they can get — scythe or hatchet — and in the centre a woman is bent over with the weight of the heavy child she carries on her back. The weavers follow each other grimly onwards against a featureless low horizon, yet one shakes his fist in anger.         

In the immediate post-WWI period, she produced the Liebknecht Memorial (1919-20), a moving tribute to the communist martyr brutally murdered by the Freikorps during the 1919 Spartacus uprising.

Also using a frieze-like composition, Kollwitz conveys raw sorrow through the grieving mourners’ bowed postures and stunned facial expressions as they file past the open coffin but especially through the stark contrast of white outlines against sooty black ink and by allowing the raw grain of the woodcut’s surface to show.

Anger, pity, sorrow and resistance characterise her work. In 1914 her youngest son Peter was killed in action in Flanders fields and, so devastating were the millions of unnecessary deaths and mutilations of the Great War, that henceforth Kollwitz devoted much her work to opposing future war.

Her lithograph No More War of 1924 was commissioned for the Central German Youth Day in Leipzig.  It expresses the savage passion with which a young person defies all ideals of social decorum to oppose war.

Is this a young man or young woman? The gender ambivalence enhances the universality of the message. Even the figure’s shorn hair bristles with anger, while the toothy mouth and fierce gesture rebels against conventions of feminine decorum.

During the Weimar Republic, her work was appreciated and sought after and she produced numerous leaflets, posters and illustrations for socialist and progressive organisations including the magazines Simplicissimus and AIZ.

In 1927 she visited the USSR at the invitation of the  Artists' Union and, although she never joined a political party, her work was close to the communist calls for socialist realism and accessibility. And she never opposed the party.

Kollwitz’s work was rooted in personal experience, filtered through her political beliefs. Her visceral expressions of hatred of war were rooted in her loss of her son. Her depictions of poverty stemmed from close contact with the immiseration which underlay many illnesses of her husband’s working-class patients.

Anger and empathy for the victims of social and political injustice fired her emotive responses but, far from wildly wailing in an ivory tower, she took her messages into the widest possible public arenas with ephemeral graphics intended to engender political and social change.

And that is possibly why to this day her work is still ignored or marginalised by much mainstream art history, which still dismisses such political art as not being “real” art at all.