Curated by Starr Figura.
First a quick note up front: I didn’t take pictures of all the captions because I assumed there would be a checklist on the website, but there is not, so I don’t have full information on some of the artworks I want to mention. My fault, my fault. Second, I feel like these first couple posts have been mostly positive, and I want to try my hand at writing more negative or ambivalent reviews soon, but lately I feel like I have the most to say about the things I really like, or at least find interesting. Sue me! But trust I’ll get on some hater swag soon. Not here though, this exhibit was a certified classic, and maybe my favorite show I’ve seen at MoMA since Cezanne Drawing.
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Close attention to calloused hands and hard worn faces. Hope and pain incised and etched deeply onto skin. This show marks the first major New York retrospective of prints and works on paper (and a few sculptures) by Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945). It’s a dense exhibition with a lot of works crammed into a few small galleries. The drawings themselves are dense too, small and packed with detailed linework. Magnifying glasses are available in the galleries, encouraging guests to look closely. The exhibition tracks her growth as an artist and thinker. Kollwitz was a socialist who made overtly socialist art for a mass audience and published her work in newspapers and periodicals where anyone could see it, and the exhibit doesn’t shy away from this fact. She made pictures of the crowd for the crowd. The wall text is actually informative too—it sticks to key biographical details, historical context, explanation of process, or explaining overt references to other artists.
The historical context is crucial since Kollwitz’s work is almost all overtly political, steeped in the terror of industrialization, multiple world wars, class stratification, and in the late works, the rise of fascism in Germany. An understanding of process is also essential, since she is primarily known as a printmaker, haven given up painting for the more populist medium of graphic arts early on. Audiences are generally less familiar with printmaking techniques than they are with painting, and the show does an excellent job of arguing that she arrived at finished works through iteration and experimentation with multiple types of printmaking.
A video on the website illustrates this just as well as the sequencing of artworks in the galleries. Here we see her start with a preparatory drawing, make an etching based on the sketch, mark up the etching with pencil, highlighting the parts she wants to focus on. Then she abandons this composition and starts another with a similar subject, making small tweaks over dozens of iterations. This type of thinking and steady revision is basically a condition of the medium of printmaking, and she embraced it, sharpening ideas into a statements.
Although she was a gifted colorist, as illustrated in the 1903 Female Nude from Behind, on Green Cloth, Kollwitz chose to excise color from her work in 1905. As the wall text informs us, she believed color’s “decorative effects to be incompatible with her socially critical subject matter.” As a result, she increasingly honed her technique towards line and composition, creating stark contrasts of positive and negative space. Her images are bold, immediately legible, but carefully rendered. And this suits the mode of address of posters, pamphlets, and periodicals where she published her work. It’s also populist in a more literal way, since it’s easier and cheaper to print in black and white. The absence of color also creates a sense of sobriety.
In an interview on Kollwitz’s work, published on the MoMA website, photographer Wolfgang Tillmans articulates the nature of this achievement perfectly. It’s worth quoting in full:
“Her work lent itself to illustrating history books just as much as to being a political campaign tool in the past. That is a rare quality. Often, I find art that serves a political purpose lacks artistic freedom. In her case, there is a great junction of that. Kollwitz’s art works in the graphic design department as material for a poster, it’s a history lesson, and at the same time it’s a breathtaking, stunningly executed work on paper.”
That’s exactly it.
I found the intensity of the faces in her of Pieta prints, after Michelangelo to be particularly touching. The closely cropped composition is sturdy and simple. The darkness of the hands against the boy’s pale skin. The way their heads fall against each other. A perfect, singular gesture of grief, which like Michelangelo’s sculpture at the Vatican, makes a turn towards the universal. It’s not one person’s suffering being represented here, it’s everyone’s suffering.
This frame from the Peasant’s War series, a seven sheet cycle of etchings completed between 1901 and 1908 narrates the Peasant’s War of 1524-25 and acts as a model for a revolutionary tradition. I chose this sheet specifically because I like the dramatic diagonal composition and how the little light there is gleams off of the scythes on the lower left side of the picture. And because all the light in the picture is in that corner it efficiently leads the eye from the top right down to the lower left.
I don’t have anything to say about this one, just some amazing hands. The focus on how the fingers bend, the repetition to get it right.
This is from the Death series, eight sheets completed between 1934 and 1937 about death. I find the encroachment of the heavy swath of black at the top of the sheet so haunting, like a veil falling or a weight starting to compress. Death here is anonymous, spindly. These late works are some of the sharpest and most anguished.
Heavy, heavy darkness and bright white highlights.
An example of process, this preparatory drawing for Charge also from the Peasant’s War series shows Kollwitz finding the focal point of the final etching, the rising hands of a peasant woman. She rendered her figures with such care, as though every face in the crowd was a family member. Setting aside the more overt political messages, like the poster Never Again War which are totally effective, Kollwitz’s less explicit work still models collectivity in the intense, almost desperate impulse to try to inhabit and understand other people. This is what the best art can do. Throughout the show we see Kollwitz focusing her major themes—grief, love, and struggle—through repetition, experimentation, and a stubborn commitment to finding the right way to say the thing that feels important, even if it’s difficult or in her case, dangerous. Is all of this cliché? One of you has to tell me if I’m being cliché. Just go see the show okay.