From Posada to Isotype, from Kollwitz to Catlett: Exchanges of Political Print Culture

Benjamin H.D. Buchloh

Among the many inspirations that triggered the idea and the desire for this exhibition and catalog, one is primary: an encounter with Paul Westheim’s Das Holzschnittbuch (The woodcut book), published in Potsdam in 1921.1 One of the central figures of Weimar artistic culture, not only as a critic but as an art historian and the editor and publisher of one of Weimar Germany’s most important art journals, Das Kunstblatt (The art paper), Westheim was until recently almost entirely forgotten, certainly far less known and studied than his friend and peer, Carl Einstein.2 Westheim’s history of the technique and the medium of the woodcut claims to trace the ancient graphic practice’s evolution from Chinese and Japanese sources to the beginnings of German woodcut culture in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries all the way to the present. Yet, paradoxically, Westheim’s archaeology of the graphic medium seems to have been subliminally engaged in the peculiar project of establishing a specifically German variation of modernism, an autochthonous lineage he perceived as culminating in the woodcuts of German expressionism.

In spite of Westheim’s archaeology locating the woodcut’s origins in Asian practices, the critic tried to invest the manifestly transnational medium with qualities specific to the fiction of a particular nation-state culture. Even more astonishing is the fact that this recoding of print culture from an internationalist to a nationally specific character would also occur later in Westheim’s writings, when—after his forced emigration to Mexico in 1941—he expanded the horizon of the medium’s geopolitically determined characteristics and endowed them with the particular needs of an emerging postrevolutionary Mexican nation-state, discerning these in the most important figures of Mexican print production, from José Guadalupe Posada to Leopoldo Méndez. 3

To illuminate this somewhat perplexing subtext of Westheim’s book, one only has to look across the border to France, whose modernist painting and print culture were undoubtedly as familiar to Westheim in the 1920s as was the work of his German expressionist contemporaries.4 The woodcut had been practically absent from French nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernism. Since Édouard Manet and Honoré Daumier, lithography had become the print medium of a technologically mediated modernity in France, allowing for accelerated production and increased quantities of distribution (soon to be followed by industrial forms of steel engraving). Additionally, lithography’s iconic resemblance and procedural proximity to the photographic process communicated accessibility and an innovative referentiality to its urban spectators and readers. The most eminent exception to this regime of print culture principles in late-nineteenthcentury France would be Paul Gauguin’s series of woodcuts that he produced for his private journal Le sourire (The smile) in 1899 in the Marquesas Islands. This ostentatious resurrection of an antiquated artisanal technique confirms that the woodcut as a primitivizing medium responded to an emerging desire for a transhistorical universality of experience and a transcultural authenticity— the desire that subjects and images not be primarily mediated by industrial technologies but instead be grounded in a presumably deeper materiality, with the medium of the woodcut sustaining a mythical link to madera, matter, if not to nature as a fiction of maternity.

Not one of Gauguin’s most eminent painterly colleagues, however, from Georges Seurat to Paul Cézanne, from Pierre Bonnard to Odilon Redon, seems to have attempted to resurrect the woodcut as an intentional regression to mythical structures of perception, experience, and representation of universally accessible human experience. Most striking perhaps is the example of Seurat. Precisely because he had mapped the collectively ruling principles of technological reproduction (photography and digital deconstruction of iconic representation) onto the execution of his drawings and paintings, Seurat quite logically never produced prints at all. In the context of subsequent French artistic practices of the 1900–1910 period, the obsolete medium could be found only in the graphic production of manifestly retardataire figures such as Félix Vallotton and, later, André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck, who attempted to resist an increasingly self-critical modernity they themselves could not attain. The most striking example of an avant-gardist’s reflections on the medium’s obsolescence can be found in Pablo Picasso’s early graphic practices. His most famous early print, Le repas frugal (The Frugal Repast, 1904), still embraced and celebrated the grand technical traditions of printmaking. Only the second etching the artist made, it demonstrates his mastery of the most refined tonal registers of etching and aquatint. Four years later in Still Life with a Fruit Bowl (1908), Picasso performed a shocking volte face in one of the most aggressive acts of the deskilling of graphic culture, producing a work that seems primarily directed at the artisanal marvels of his own prints of the Blue/Rose period in the way that his first cubist paintings had undone that painterly legacy. Reducing the graphic inscriptions and incisions to the almost mechanically distilled and literally dis-figured lines of the antiiconic drypoint etching, approaching the threshold of abstraction, the complement of the tonal refinement of aquatint qualifies at best as a self-critical reflection on the production processes of graphic mark-making itself. Picasso’s cubist prints precisely enact the awareness that the time had come not just to challenge conventions of drawing and painting but equally to challenge the whole apparatus of learned academic forms of knowledge and artisanal competence that print culture had internalized and most solidly sustained. 5

Thus, when considering Käthe Kollwitz, one of the great retardataire artists of the twentieth century, and the contradictory reception of her extraordinary graphic work—both the failure to recognize her as one of the great European modernists and the considerable success of her practices as a model for artists emerging outside the perimeters of European modernist culture, from the Soviet Union in the 1920s to the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s, and, in the context of our exhibition project, her influence on Mexican printmakers and African American artists working in Mexico from the late 1930s to the 1950s—we have to clarify three intertwined strands of historical overdetermination. First, we must consider Kollwitz’s motivations, during the first three decades of the twentieth century, for insisting on the internalized apparatus of the manifestly outmoded iconographic and technical graphic traditions that had constituted her practice since the latenineteenth century.6 Second, we have to comprehend the motivations of some of the crucial critics and historians of modernism (whether so called AngloAmerican formalists such as Roger Fry and Clement Greenberg or French social art historians such as Pierre Francastel) to exclude Kollwitz from the discursive formations of their versions of modernist history.7 Third, and most important for our project here, we have to understand the factors that determined the emphatically positive dispositions and counteridentifications among the different geopolitical communities that engaged with Kollwitz’s work as an exemplary model and a point of departure for their own critical and artistic political print production. These range from Anatoly Lunacharsky’s enthusiastic response to her work, inviting her to visit the Soviet Union in 1924 and declaring her to be a model for the emerging aesthetics of socialist realism; to the emphatic embrace of Kollwitz’s work by American feminists of the first three decades of the twentieth century, articulated in Elizabeth McCausland’s brilliant early essay on Kollwitz, published in 1937 and followed by a second essay in 1941; and culminating in the almost programmatic adaptation of Kollwitz’s iconography and graphic procedures in the work of some of the members of the Taller de Gráfica Popular (People’s Graphics Workshop, TGP), from 1937 onward, in particular in Elizabeth Catlett’s work at the TGP in 1946.8

The most obvious reasons for the failure to recognize Kollwitz’s significance and the refusal to accept her within the modernist canon are undoubtedly to be found in a European (and American) art history writing that had been profoundly defined by both masculinist indifference if not outright discrimination toward women artists so as to sustain the ideological demands and hegemonic concepts of a masculinist modernist culture all through the twentieth century. One can find no better example articulating both the aggressive hierarchization of gendered criteria and the condescension of the hegemonic (male) doxa of a modernist aesthetic than the utterly disparaging obituary for Kollwitz written by Greenberg in 1945:

Apparently a strong talent, she was deflected as well as inspired by her sympathy with the suffering and the oppressed. The problems she proposes herself in her etchings and lithographs are solved sometimes with considerable success, but always within the academic framework, with light and shade used as much as Rembrandt would have used them—only more nervously. It is in her woodcuts, where silhouette and texture show Munch’s influence, that she tries to attain a greater intensity of expressiveness. Here the power is such that one is disappointed that it is not more. The passion inspired in her by her theme required a complementary passion for her medium, to counteract a certain inevitable excess. Because this excess remains—in our failure to be stirred as much as we feel we ought to be—her art never quite soars into that sphere where Goya and Daumier move. Nevertheless, Käthe Kollwitz will not be forgotten; her seriousness and moral passion suffice to create a lasting personality if not a lasting art.9

Greenberg is right in positioning Kollwitz within a historical trajectory of graphic mastery ranging from Rembrandt to Francisco Goya and Daumier. Considering herself to be a near autodidact in the graphic disciplines, Kollwitz had independently acquired an exceptional competence in etching and lithography. At the same time—probably due to the subtextual appeal of regional particularity and national specificity—Kollwitz was strangely attracted to, and even influenced by, the peculiar strands of relatively provincial yet technically accomplished nineteenth-century German graphic traditions, resulting from a brief tutelage by Karl Stauffer-Bern at the Berliner Künstlerinnenschule (Berlin School for Women Artists). Stauffer-Bern had introduced Kollwitz to the work and writings of Max Klinger, whose uncannily realistic prints (culminating in his portfolio Der Handschuh [The glove], 1879–1881) had shifted etching into more industrialized forms of steel engravings. Since the failure of a development of a truly critical bourgeois public sphere in Germany in the nineteenth century had caused the absence of genre conventions of radical artistic caricature (as in Daumier or Grandville), Kollwitz’s desire for oppositional political narratives was suspended from the start between the gravitas of meeting the authoritarian demands of the high-cultural, patriarchal traditions of printmaking from Rembrandt to Goya and the no-less-grave demands for a realism of pathos and empathy that would articulate a political critique engaging her imagined communities of the German working class in general and its women in particular.10 Thus we have to clarify further why Kollwitz resisted the radical projects of a modernist deskilling of print and painting by photographic means, as had emerged most vehemently in 1920’s Berlin Dada. Shifting at that very moment even further backward, as in her portfolio Krieg (War, 1922–1923, pp. 142–149), for example, Kollwitz returned to the woodcut as an agitational device to address working-class audiences, refusing to recognize that photography was in fact already challenging the political claims of traditional print culture.

Thus, a peculiar problem of multiple asynchronicities emerges, somewhat unusual perhaps in the history of modernism. First, we have to confront the paradox that Kollwitz on her own had mastered the masculinist apparatus of exceptionally accomplished artisanal printmakers’ techniques. Thus, she now inhabited and performed an excess of skills at precisely that historical moment when these had emerged as the epistemological and historical targets of subversive deskilling for all serious avant-garde artistic practices. Second, and an even greater paradox, was the fact that it was a woman who had successfully incorporated this most astonishing skill set of masculinist practices and artisanal competences. One need only to imagine the Picasso of the Repas frugal being confronted in 1905 with Kollwitz’s aquatint Beim Dengeln (Sharpening the scythe, 1905, p. 99) to easily imagine the menacing rivalry that this female artist, German at that, would have offered. Third, as modernism evolved with the rise of cubism, an aesthetic of empathy did not exactly become one of the avant-garde’s primary motivations. Imaginary revolutionary solidarity could be figured at all times: a call to arms, a progressive (male) brotherhood, clandestine coding systems to be shared only by the initiated—these were some of the key motivations of the radical avant-garde movements of the twentieth century. Given modernism’s spectrum, ranging from diffidence to indifference to outright rejection, the fact that Kollwitz’s aesthetics of empathy was ultimately met with rejection is hardly surprising.

1. Westheim was not the first major critic and art historian to address the specificities of the German graphic tradition. Wilhelm Worringer—one of his teachers—had already published a major study on the history of medieval and early modern book illustration in 1912, and Max J. Friedländer had published the first version of his study of the woodcuts in the Berlin Graphic collections in 1917. See Wilhelm Worringer, Die Altdeutsche Buchillustration (Leipzig: R. Piper, 1912); and Max J. Friedländer, Der Holzschnitt (Berlin: Handbücher der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin, 1917).

2. A first major study of Westheim’s activities as a critic and editor in Weimar Germany was written by Lutz

Windhövel, Paul Westheim und das Kunstblatt (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 1995). In the anglophone literature, it was Peter Chametzky’s essay on Paul Westheim that recovered details of the biography and the work of this eminent Weimar critic and later historian of Aztec and Mayan sculpture during his life in exile in Mexico. See Peter Chametzky, “Paul Westheim in Mexico: A Cosmopolitan Man Contemplating the Heavens,” Oxford Art Journal 24, no. 1 (2001): 23–44 (reprinted in a revised version in this volume).

3. Westheim’s Holzschnittbuch was translated into Spanish by his wife, Mariana Frenk-Westheim, and was published in Mexico in 1954 with extensive additions incorporating the work of the Mexican printmakers Posada and Mendez. See El grabado en madera (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1954).

4. Evident, for example, in Westheim’s essay addressing precisely this question. See Paul Westheim, “Deutsche und Französische Kunstanschauung,” in Für und Wider: Kritische Anmerkungen zur Kunst der Gegenwart (Potsdam: Gustav Kiepenheuer, 1923), 33–48.

5. The historical culmination of printmaking’s selfannihilating critical reflections occurred in 1959 when Marcel Duchamp produced a drypoint intaglio simply spelling the word non in capital letters across the surface of the print. See the edition by Pierre André Benoit, Première lumière (Alès, France: PAB, 1959).

6. Kollwitz visited Paris in 1901 and again in 1904, discovering the works of late-nineteenth-century French artists, some older and some of them closer to her own generation, such as Théophile Alexandre Steinlen, Bonnard, Eugène Carrière, Edgar Degas, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Under the impact of those discoveries, Kollwitz would soon transcend the confines of German art. Strangely, the question of whether she also discovered the work of Vincent van Gogh seems to have escaped scholarly attention. This is all the more surprising since van Gogh produced a series of eighteen major drawings of the weavers’ impoverished lives in the Dutch town of Nuenen, where he lived in 1883–1884, work that seems to anticipate Kollwitz’s commitment to this subject in her first major print portfolio, Ein Weberaufstand (A Weavers’ Revolt, 1897–1898).

7. For a comprehensive account not of the formalist modernist rejection but of the originary ideologically and politically motivated exclusionary responses by the imperial male authorities on the occasion of Kollwitz’s first exhibition of A Weavers’ Revolt, see Jay Clarke, “Kollwitz, Gender, Biography and Social Activism,” in Käthe Kollwitz: Prints, Process, Politics, ed. Louis Marchesano (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2020), 40–56: “When Kollwitz debuted A Weavers’ Revolt at the Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung (Great Berlin art exhibition) in 1898, the jury voted for her to be given a gold medal. When Minister of Culture Robert Bosse saw the list of proposed medal recipients, he promptly wrote to Emperor Wilhelm II: ‘The suggested prize for Käthe Kollwitz gives me cause for concern.

. . . In view of the subject of the work and its naturalistic execution, entirely lacking in mitigating or conciliatory elements, I do not believe I can recommend it for explicit recognition by the State.’ Emperor Wilhelm II remarked on the award to a group of listeners: ‘I ask you gentlemen, a medal for a woman, that would be going too far. That would practically amount to a debasement of every elevated distinction. Distinctions and medals belong on the breasts of deserving men’” (42). But the phobic disdain with which Kollwitz’s work was censored under the conditions of the Wilhelminian empire was no less evident in the response by the emperor’s spouse, Augusta Victoria, when confronted with the first poster Kollwitz published: “For her first poster, commissioned by the organizers of the Deutsche Heimarbeit Ausstellung in Berlin in 1906 Kollwitz illustrated a fatigued female proletariat. Empress Augusta Victoria, the wife of the kaiser, was so offended by the sympathetic picture of an overworked woman that every example on public display had to be covered before she agreed to attend the exhibition.” Louis Marchesano, “Introduction,” in Käthe Kollwitz, ed. Marchesano, 22.

8. Elizabeth McCausland, “Käthe Kollwitz,” Parnassus Magazine 9, no. 2 (February 1937): 20–25 (reprinted in this volume). McCausland’s second essay was published as an introduction to a portfolio of lithographic reproductions of Kollwitz’s work by the German émigré dealer Curt Valentin. See Käthe Kollwitz: Ten Lithographs (New York: Curt Valentin, 1941). For an excellent account of the reception of Kollwitz’s work and its changing fates in America, see Jean Owens Schafer, “Kollwitz in America: A Study of Reception,” Woman’s Art Journal 15, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 1994): 29–34. One notable exception to the modernist exclusion is the exhibition of Kollwitz’s prints side by side with those of George Grosz and Otto Dix, two great former Dada artists who became engaged in radical antiwar practices, in a 1936 show of antiwar prints by German artists curated by Jere Abbott at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. In his introductory notes for the exhibition, Abbott confronts the issue of art and propaganda: “We often feel, quite falsely, that great art is either descriptive or social, but when message and execution are fused to the same end the result is an artistic creation so completely moving that there is no room for separated elements to exist. Then we see the close bond between propaganda and art as its medium.” See Jere Abbott, “Note,” in War: Drawings, Water Colors, Lithographs: Grosz—Kollwitz—Dix, Smith College Museum of Art, November 11–December 6, 1936. Twenty-three Kollwitz prints were included in the show.

9. Clement Greenberg, “Art,” The Nation, December 15, 1945: 669, reprinted in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago, University of Chicago, 1986), 45–46.

10. A well-developed type of colloquial caricature was operative in Germany, fulminant in the second half of the nineteenth century, in all types of magazines and journals, of which Simplicissimus is the most famous. Kollwitz contributed to the German weekly (founded by Albert Langen in 1896) from 1908 to 1910, producing commissioned drawings—titled Portraits of Misery—that commented on the plight of impoverished women by showing poverty, starvation, infant mortality, and alcoholism. But this vernacular genre should be distinguished from the aesthetic and political trajectory of caricature that had been developed in France, ranging from Daumier to Grandville, but did not find a corresponding set of practices in Germany until the arrival of Grosz and John Heartfield in the second decade of the twentieth century.