Art: A Weapon against Complacency

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were well known to German Kathe Kollwitz; she had sketched them from life for more than 50 years. When Death finally turned on her in Germany’s Harz Mountains last September, she was 78, worn out, and nearly blind. But her prints and drawings still stood as a terrible and pitiful description of human suffering. In the ‘205 they had seemed, to U.S. eyes, grotesquely exaggerated; the pictures of Belsen now made them seem like plain, eyewitness reporting.

Last week a Manhattan gallery opened a memorial exhibition of her work. Art-lovers dropped in, shivering inside their overcoats from Manhattan’s cold. They went out, after looking at pictures like The Hand of Death (see cut), understanding a bit better about the many in Europe who will freeze and starve this winter.

Art was a simple thing to Socialist Kathe Kollwitz. For her, it was simply a weapon with which to fight complacency. In 1891, at 24, she married a Berlin doctor, helped finance his clinic by selling harrowing studies of the kind of people who came to him as patients. Kaiser Wilhelm II called her stuff “the art of the gutter,” in 1898 canceled a gold medal award which was to have been given her. She bitterly opposed World War I, and skillfully recorded its ugly aftermath in Germany. The Nazis stopped her from exhibiting, but she kept right on working, turned to sculpture when her eyes dimmed. She only changed her weapons; what she was fighting for did not change.