Kathe Kollwitz Graphics, Posters and Drawings Auteur: Käthe Kollwitz Taal: Engels

Auteur: Käthe Kollwitz Co-auteur: Lucy R. Lippard

• Engels
• Paperback
• 01 oktober 1981
• 145 pagina's

Gathers dramatic ethings, lithographs, woodcuts, and drawings which deal with hunger, war, and death
The proof of Kollwitz's authenticity as a propagator is the fact that whereas most socially involved artists today use (and need to use) a combination of words and images to communicate to an audience that doesn't expect a message from art, Kollwitz's wordless prints and drawings are as politically effective as her posters, or even more so. Ironi- cally, it is due to this success that she is so often called a "mere propagandist." In her white-on-black woodcuts, the figures loom out of a darkness that seems as historical as it is spatial. She used this crisp, unrelenting medium to document equally relentless conditions. Even when the dramatic gesture or movement is paramount, the subject's intensity is carried by volume, transmitted by lights and darks, black and white. Her politics emerged from her social life, her gut, her heart, her historical awareness, and merged with the forms of the human bodies that were the vehicles for her beliefs. She dealt with tragedy, not pathos, though tragedy was not usually associated with the lives of working-class people. The sheer weight of this lived experience provides an enduring metaphor for Kollwitz's art. Her formal strategies were integrated with her content. There are no weak spots in her shapes or composi- tions; like her figures, they are compact and earthbound, held together by a suggested solidity/solidarity. In the person of each weary woman, bowed under oppression she is helpless to affect directly, is the hidden courage and endurance that permits her to survive and will eventually permit her to fight back.