Kaethe Kollwitz Overview

As part of a politicaly progressive middle-class family in Koenigsberg Kaethe Schmidt was encouraged to develop her skills in painting and drawing. By age of 14 she was taking private classes with local artist, since the Koeingsberg Academy barred female pupils. She later studied in Munich and Berlin.-In 1891 she married the physician Karl Kollwitz and later have two sons. The family settled in a working-class neighborhood of Berlin. Her models where her husband´s patients, urban poor.The democratic qualities of the grahic arts she decided to become a printmaker.--For the next 50 years she produced dramatic emotion-filled etchings, woodcuts and lithographs generally in black and white, sometimes including touches of clor. Athough Kollwitz´s wrenching subjects and virituoso thechnique soon made her work popluar througout Germany and the western world, they generated controvery.Kollwitz also encountered difficulties during the Nazi area. In 1933 dhe was forced to resign her position as the first female professor appointed to the Prussian Academy in 1919, soon thereafter she was forbidden to exhibit her art.--During her final years Kaethe Kollwitz produced bronze and stone sculpture, embodying the same types of subects and aesthetic values as her work in two dimensions. Much of her art was destroyed in a Berlin air raid in 1943. Later that year she was evacuated to Dresden where she died at 78.