Käthe Kollwitz*

Elizabeth McCausland

The work of Käthe Kollwitz is the greatest poem of this age in Germany, a poem reflecting the trials and suffering of humble and simple folk. This woman with her great heart has taken the people into her mothering arms with somber and tender pity. She is the voice of the silence of the sacrificed.

Romain Rolland

Poem of grief, bereavement and privation it is that Kollwitz recites in her prints. It is a poem as silent as those humble and simple sacrificed ones whose voice she is. It is a poem of anguished and desolated mothers and of children who starve for lack of bread. It is a poem written in the stark black woodcuts, Krieg (War, 1922–1923, pp. 142–149), and in the lithographic self-portraits where she has become, as one critic says, mankind itself, tortured and mutilated by suffering but not destroyed. But most of all it is a poem which has never been published and therefore a poem never read.

Käthe Kollwitz is seventy years old this year. Probably the greatest woman artist of modern times, she has created enduring masterpieces in the Ein Weberaufstand ( A Weavers’ Revolt, 1897–1898, pp. 87–93) cycle, the Bauernkrieg (Peasants’ war, 1903–1908, pp. 95–103) series, the woodcuts, Krieg, the self-portraits and the posters, Brot! (Bread!, 1924), Unsere Kinder hungern (Our children are starving, 1923), Helft Russland! (Help Russia!, 1921) and Nie Wieder Krieg! (Never again war!, 1923). In Germany she garnered, in difficult historical times, a recognition not equal to her genius. In this country she is little known. Yet her work is one of the great human documents of the twentieth century as well as great art.

Kollwitz’s fiftieth birthday was celebrated in Berlin, even in the midst of the World War, with a retrospective exhibition, a notable honor for an artist only turned the half century; usually retrospectives come closer to the hundred mark.

On her sixtieth birthday a supplement was issued for the catalogue published by Sievers in 1913. Her seventieth birthday no doubt will go unnoticed in her own country and unsung here. It must remain for later decades to recognize the important artistic creation of Käthe Kollwitz, who is not only a very great woman artist, but also one of the two or three outstanding German artists of this generation.

Käthe Kollwitz’s career is ironic, like a note in music which has come into the counterpoint of history a fraction of a beat too soon or too late. In her young womanhood her sympathies for the working class and her political affiliations militated against her so that in 1898 Wilhelm II vetoed the award of a gold medal to her for the Weberaufstand cycle. Again, in 1906, her poster for the Home Industries Exposition showing a working woman in realistic pose, exhausted and discouraged, was suppressed by the Kaiserin. Then the war came, interrupting her graphic arts work and bringing her profound awareness of the suffering of women and children to a bitter personal climax in the death of her younger son who was killed in action.

At the war’s close she had brief opportunity to carry on her work, being the first woman to be elected to the Prussian Academy (this in 1918) and becoming director of graphic arts in the Academy in 1928. But in the post-war years she was not free of the grief of simple and humble folk, mothers bereaved of their children, children starving. In these years she created the final masterpiece of her career, the wood cuts Krieg exhibited in 1923, which followed with inevitable and powerful logic the earlier series of etchings Ein Weberaufstand and Bauernkrieg. At the same time she was making the masterly posters in lithography which called upon the “sacrificed ones” to end war.

No wonder that the 1927 self-portrait, a lithograph, reveals Kollwitz at sixty with a worn and tortured face. She had since her youth vicariously borne the burdens of working class women, inhabitants of the “Northeast Quarter” in Berlin where Kollwitz has lived for more than forty years with her physician husband. With her political beliefs (she has been a Socialist since her youth), she had the more bitterly endured the war. Citizen of a conquered nation, she knew the lean years of inflation and Ersatz bread, butter, cheese, and wurst. Then at sixtysix she received the crowning blow. The German Republic which she had seen born after the débacle of Versailles fell before the Hitler coup d’état. She did not have to go into exile. She did, however, lose her position as director of graphic arts in the Academy. And now at seventy she lives in Berlin, for all practical purposes silenced by her own country of whom she is, as Rolland writes, “the greatest poem.”

The irony in lives like hers is made more emphatic by the stature of the individual. This simple hermetical tale (to use Thomas Mann’s phrase) would be deeply moving were Kollwitz a humble working woman. But add genius to humanity and the irony becomes more pointed. Here is a great artist, ignored and suppressed in her fatherland, barred from participation in affairs, never well known outside Germany. To be sure, the gold medal refused by the Kaiser in 1898 was granted a year later at Dresden. A decade afterwards she was awarded the Villa Romana prize which enabled her to spend a year in Italy. After the War, under the Socialist regime, a school was founded in her honor, the Käthe Kollwitz Schule. But Kollwitz has never had the wide recognition she deserves. One must fall back on the irony of history to explain the paradox; justice does not.

Käthe Schmidt was born July 8, 1867 in Königsberg, East Prussia. The social ideas which oriented her work were a double inheritance. Her father, inspired by the 1848 revolutions, abandoned his law studies and allied himself with the working class becoming a master mason. He married the daughter of Dr. Julius Rupp, first pastor of the Free Church of Königsberg whom Kollwitz late in life described as a “religiöse Mensch” (religious man) and who unquestionably was a great influence in his granddaughter’s life. From the days of Marx and Engels and Lasalle, the era of social democracy, came the energies for Kollwitz’s creative life, energies recognized by one critic when he wrote: “She is probably the only one in our time who has achieved the ideal medieval esthetic discipline through content—then religious, now social.”

Beginning her art education at thirteen in Königsberg, she studied engraving before she went at seventeen to Berlin to study with Stauffer-Bern. Here she saw Max Klinger’s cycle, Ein Leben (A life), exhibited in 1884; and Klinger, carrying on the century-old tradition of lithography, became the strongest artistic influence in her life. Greater forces however were the intellectual and social. Her brother Karl, later to become editor of the Vorwärts in Berlin, was studying literature and political economy at the same time she was studying art. He introduced her to Goethe’s philosophy and to Freiligrath’s political poems. Zola, Ibsen, Arne Garborg, Tolstoi, Dostoievski, Gorki, Gerhart Hauptmann, Arno Holz and Julius Hart were the spiritual sustenance of this period. A little later Kollwitz was to see a collection of Hogarth’s prints which had a strong effect on her. It is not strange that the first graphic work by which she established herself was inspired by Hauptmann’s Weavers, a social drama dedicated to the playwright’s grandfather, himself a weaver.

Meanwhile her formal education went on. Returning to Königsberg, she studied there a short while, of which later she wrote laconically, “Es war eine triste Zeit.” In 1888 she went to Munich to study with Herterich, where healthy, happy life and the companionship of her fellows, she wrote, was like “fresh water.” By now she knew the direction of her life. In her youth she had become aware of economic misery in a Germany where more than seventy-two per cent of the population lived on an average income of $75 a year. Her marriage in 1891 to Dr. Karl Kollwitz, a boyhood friend of her brother, practicing in a working class neighborhood, did not change the course of her life; it only deepened the channel.

The decade, 1890 to 1900, was a period of intensive experimentation whose technical research did not, however, interfere with the creation of Kollwitz’s first masterpiece, Ein Weberaufstand (1897–1898). During these years she worked with etching (and how strange those early efforts, for which most of the plates are lost and the prints rare!) then with variants of the etching process, with soft ground, aquatint, dry point, with those procedures bearing the composite names of Aussprengverfahren,

Durchdruckverfahren, Stoffdurchdruckverfahren, Schmirgeldurchdruckverfahren, and even with a combination of metal plate and lithographic stone. Among her experiments were drawing on the copper plate with pen and ink and then covering the plate with a soft ground before immersing it in water, which had the effect of removing the ground from the drawing; sprinkling the ground with sand; pressing a thin, finely textured cloth over the ground; later, using emery paper as a backing for the transfer paper on which she drew her lithographic designs. These experiments were sound training for a hand and an eye ever seeking greater truth to nature.

By 1896 Kollwitz had become interested in lithography, then experiencing a new popularity due to the centennial celebration of the medium’s invention. Before the war she had begun work in the plastic arts. And the decade after the armistice saw the artist turn to the powerful and somber wood cut as the inevitably right medium for defeat’s black mood, which could not but color the work of a German in those years. In this medium, as used by Kollwitz, post-war expressionism, even if unconsciously, reached perhaps its highest level. Not only did Kollwitz experiment with many forms of etching, she also had her plates printed on various colors and kinds of papers in different colored inks and with varied tints of toning.

The artist’s care to find the right physical expression for what she was saying also showed itself in the amount of work she did on the plate or stone after the first proof was taken. The etching, Losbruch (Outbreak, 1903, p. 101), from Bauernkrieg, exists in eight states and Schlachtfeld (Battlefield, 1907, p. 102) from the same series, in nine, the greatest number recorded in Sievers or the supplement. It is not uncommon to find six states. Occasionally a print shows up in a rare state, as the wood cut, Das Opfer (The sacrifice, 1922–1923, p. 143), in the Smith College Museum of Art, which the artist, not satisfied with the proof as printed, has touched up with Chinese white to guide her in further cutting of the block.

Technically speaking, this decade was a period of trying her wings. Significantly, as she went on, Kollwitz sought simpler forms and larger masses and areas. Her etchings increased from an early four and one-half by three and a quarter inches to the largest, Losbruch, twenty by twenty-three inches. The lithographic posters are even larger, increasing from the banned Home Industries placard, twenty-seven and a quarter by nineteen inches, to the thirty-seven by twentyseven and one-half inches of Nie Wieder Krieg! The self-portraits also grow progressively larger, compared with the small plates of the 1890’s. These dimensions, however, give little real sense of the monumental effect, as the total area occupied by the dynamic tension of the composition is far greater than the actual space the drawing occupies. The final expression of the artist’s inner need for an epic scale is to be found in the sculptures for the Soldatenfriedhof in Belgium, dedicated to her son, Peter, killed at Dixmuiden in October, 1914, in which the figures of the sorrowing father and mother are portraits of herself and her husband.

This search for a form mated with its purpose is revealed also in the number of plates discarded. Some were put aside after the edition had been printed but a considerable number were abandoned because they did not meet Kollwitz’s standards. In Sievers’ catalog and the supplement there are listed about 100 etchings; of these forty-nine plates are not in existence, thirty being discarded at some stage. Of about eighty lithographic stones forty-six were destroyed, fifteen of them before they were finished. Of the wood cuts listed, thirty in all, five blocks were destroyed and four more abandoned. Showing infinite pains Kollwitz made many plates for the Weavers cycle and then discarded them. For Bauernkrieg, Kollwitz made a number of lithographic studies before she decided that lithography was not the medium for the subject and went back to etching.

Another evidence of her self-criticism is the way themes recur. At different periods of her work a subject would obsess her, notably the Mutter mit totem Sohn (Mother with Dead Son) or Tod, Frau und Kind (Death, woman, and child), as if in what she observed of working-class mothers in the Berlin slums she saw foreshadowed her own bereavement. This is true of two etchings dating from 1903 and another from 1910 which lead up to post-war prints, where a composition is used again and again, a composition originally set forth in the lithograph, Pietà (Sievers No. 70).

Kollwitz’s technical interests should be emphasized because it has been the custom to write as if she were an artist who let emotion take the place of discipline. Now without question Kollwitz derives from the humanistic, metaphysical, sozialdemokratisch ideology. But she also derives from a national tradition of sound craftsmanship. Before she could create her greatest prints, she had to serve a rigorous apprenticeship to the print media. Besides a sincere love for the material aspects of print-making, she unquestionably also has had that relentless camera eye which makes an artist recorder and historian of the external world. Her approach to art is vastly different from the Düsseldorf and Munich styles which flourished in her student days, when an art magazine could write under the title, Children in Modern German Art, “The best art of Germany seeks escape from prosaic reality in the regions of the imagination; it clothes life in poetry.” With Kollwitz prosaic reality became the highest poetry. And through her imagination she was able to depict “the story of human life, from the cradle to the grave,” not sentimentally, but as millions of poor people exist, knocking at the doors of free medical clinics for prenatal advice, sitting huddled in unheated tenements, watching a beloved child slowly die for lack of proper food and care, searching the battlefield for a missing son.

To place Kollwitz in her historical context is to accentuate the paradox of her destiny. In that fin de siècle era of smugness and complacency, the more talented and creative artists had to form the “Secession” to open any avenues of opportunity. In England the Pennells, writing in the Fortnightly Review of lithography’s centenary, indulged dangerously in prophecy: “As an artistic profession, lithography will never be revived.” Across the British Channel a woman was creating work which disproves their words. A few years later, in 1901, the Grolier Club held an exhibition in New York City of engravings, etchings and lithographs by women, the most modern instances being Rosa Bonheur, Mary Cassatt, Maria Anna Angelica Kauffmann, and Queen Victoria, with Queen Christina of Sweden and Mme. de Pompadour close seconds. Yet already Kollwitz had established herself as a foremost contemporary graphic artist. “Berlin,” wrote a critic in Graphische Künste about this time, “was thrilled by the exhibition of the Weavers cycle.”

No wonder that the etchings, Ein Weberaufstand, should have thrilled Berlin, especially the “Secession,” of which she, with Max

Liebermann, Menzel and others, was a member. No wonder that Hauptmann, looking back thirty years, should write of her, “Her flowing line strikes home like a cry from the heart. Such a cry of pain was never heard in ancient times.” Looking at these etchings today, forty years after the needle last touched the plate, one does not think of their dates or periods, they have that dateless quality art possesses when it has passed from the topical into the universal, one is aware only of the urgency of what they say. And if the previous phrase should be construed by estheticians as a derogation of Kollwitz’s work, suggesting that it smacks of the literary, the answer is that today art has turned its back on unintelligibility and, having for a quarter of a century practiced non-communication, now seeks desperately to re-establish its lines of communication with the world which, after all, will be its final judge and jury.

Ein Weberaufstand is comprised of six etchings, Not (Need, 1897, p. 87), Tod (Death, 1897, p. 88), Beratung (Conspiracy, 1898, p. 89), Weberzug (March of the weavers, 1897, pp. 90–91), Sturm (Storming the gate, 1897, p. 92), and Ende (End, 1897, p. 93). A mother is watching beside her child’s bed in a dimly lighted, badly furnished room. Death is the next step from poverty and starvation. No words are needed to explain this print; its scenario is contained within the platemarks. But human beings will not forever submit to exploitation; this is Hauptmann’s thesis, a thesis Kollwitz took over. The weavers meet and plan a march of protest. In The March of the Weavers they are shown, the men armed with pickaxes, their wives marching too, going en masse to the factory-owner’s estate. In Sturm they reach the estate and are denied admittance. They clamor at the gates. The women, enraged by years of privation, tear up cobblestones. Then, last scene of all, the end, a weaver’s cottage where lie the bodies of two men killed by soldiers called out to quell the demonstration, and a scene of desolation into which the workers carry another slain weaver.

These etchings make their instantaneous appeal to the mind and to the emotions rather than to the senses. The suffering of the weavers, their sudden revolt, the brutal end to their uprising, are immediately significant. On further study, one observes how the artist achieves her effects. There is no precious emphasis on “print quality” at the price of content; yet undeniably the etchings possess print quality, the quality of a tradition continuing into our time from the baroque chiaroscuro convention of Rembrandt, but still valid. This fact in mind, it is important to note how in the lithographs and wood cuts of the postwar period Kollwitz works in another convention entirely, having changed and grown as the esthetic zeitgeist altered.

Deriving from the same energies are two etchings, social in subject, Aufruhr (Uprising) and Die Carmagnole, dated 1899 and 1901. These have the savage elan which characterizes Weberzug and Sturm. In a sense they forecast the loosing of human passions in the World War. Die Carmagnole, based on the French Revolution theme, is a link between the historical themes of the Weavers cycle and those of Bauernkrieg, an interest paramount in Kollwitz’s work until the history of the present by its immensity and horror became more engrossing than any subject from the past.

But it is inexact to write of this period of Kollwitz’s growth as if only “social” themes interested her. On the contrary, she was devoting herself to realistic observation of the world about her as well as carrying on technical experimentation. At the same time she was making those self-portraits which, if she had never done any other work, would be a monument. Beginning in 1891, she continued until recently to make her remarkable record of the life of a woman, as if she were always coming back to peer at her face in a mirror and ask, “Why does life do this to me? Why does life do this to women?” Half a lifetime, from 1891 to 1927 (the years covered in the catalogues) is set forth in thirteen etchings, twelve lithographs, four woodcuts and drawings uncounted, a stream of remembrance pulsing like a heart’s beat, so that from the graph of the years in which she made self-portraits can be traced the progress of her interior life: 1891, 1892, 1893, 1894, 1898, 1901, 1903, 1904, 1905, 1909, 1910, 1912, 1915, 1919, 1920, 1921, 1922, 1924, 1925, 1927. Interpolated, where the pulse slowed and steadied, are those masterpieces of Sachlichkeit (Objectivity), Ein Weberaufstand, Bauernkrieg and Krieg.

Bauernkrieg, her second great etching series, carried out from 1903 to 1908, is based on the Peasants’ War of 1524–1526. This was a rising of German peasants and the poorer townspeople against the feudal landlords. The revolt was the culmination of a movement begun in the late fifteenth century because of the nobles’ increasing extortions made possible by the introduction of Roman law reducing the peasants to servile status. The war began at Stühlingen near the Swiss border and spread to the districts around the Lake of Constance and to the Austrian districts. The twelve articles of Memmingen (1525) formulated the peasants’ demands: liberty to choose their own pastors, religious freedom, smaller tithes, abolition of serfdom, hunting and fishing rights, abolition of death duties, impartial courts and restriction of landlords to their feudal dues. The uprising spread all over Germany except for Bavaria and the north and the east. In most regions it was crushed in 1525 but not until 1526 in Austria, where alone some concessions were won.

The etchings in this series are Die Pflüger (The ploughmen, 1906, p. 95), Vergewaltigt (Raped, 1905, pp. 96–97), Beim Dengeln (Sharpening the scythe, 1905, p. 99), Bewaffnung in einem Gewölbe (Arming in a vault, 1906, p. 100), Losbruch (Outbreak, 1903, p. 101), Schlachtfeld (Battlefield, 1907, p. 102) and Die Gefangenen (The prisoners, 1908, p. 103). Epic of feudal exploitation, the Peasants’ War could end only in a violent outbreak of the oppressed. Human beings are shown yoked to the plow, young girls are raped by seignorial “right,” and the peasants begin to sharpen their scythes and to arm at night in a cellar. In the great print, Losbruch, the dams go out, outraged humanity sweeps forward with cyclonic force. But, as in Ein Weberaufstand, these toilers, unorganized and inferior in arms, were defeated. A mother searches the battlefield for her son. The peasants are overcome and imprisoned. In these etchings history lives again, tragic and turbulent with uncontrolled forces. For Bauernkrieg Kollwitz received the Villa Romana prize, entitling her to a year’s housing and maintenance at the Villa Romana in Florence.

In 1906 her poster for the HeimarbeitAusstellung, of which the Kaiserin was a patroness, was suppressed. Previously the Kaiser had referred to her work as “the art of the gutter,” even though the Weavers etchings had been acquired for the imperial print collection in Berlin. A little later, in 1912, a poster “in behalf of playgrounds for children” was forbidden by the police. So Kollwitz’s life went, a seesaw of hard work, of recognition among the more cultivated and of suppression by the authorities, until the war years came “like a long dream.” The younger of her sons fell on the Flanders front almost as soon as the ink was dry on the declaration of war. One of the numerous volumes published in German about Kollwitz’s work is dedicated to him. Almost no work came from this time; later there were the magnificent woodcuts, Krieg, as well as the posters, transforming her grief into a powerful indictment of war. Meanwhile she had turned experimentally to the plastic arts. Of late years, however, when failing eyesight has handicapped her for the close work of printmaking, has she executed sculptures in a professional sense. The Soldatenfriedhof sculpture is really her first finished work in the new medium. A duplicate cast is in the Kronprinzen Palace in Berlin. Last year she was working on a sculpture Mother and Child.

The woodcut is a medium inherently so capable of expressing wild emotion that it is not strange Kollwitz should have adopted it in the years after the war. The first catalogued woodcut, dated 1918 and inscribed to Romain Rolland, is called Feinde (Enemies) and represents two soldiers, no doubt of enemy armies, dead in a fraternal embrace. Her second listed woodcut (1920) is the Gedenkblatt für Karl Liebknecht (In Memorian Karl Liebknecht, p. 113), the German Socialist leader, killed in the Spartacist revolt. This theme she attempted first in etching and in lithography before deciding that its dramatic nature required the woodcut medium. Showing how her thoughts ran to peace is the woodcut, Verbrüderung, for Barbusse. Also in woodcuts is the series, Proletariat.

But her great work in this medium is Krieg (1922–1923) seven prints, Das Opfer (The sacrifice, p. 143), Die Freiwilligen (The volunteers, p. 144), Die Eltern (The parents, p. 145), Die Witwe I (The widow I, p. 146), Die Witwe II (The widow II, p. 147), Die Mütter (The mothers, p. 148) and Das Volk (The people, p. 149). The mother offers up her child as a sacrifice to the powers that cause war. The volunteers fight and are killed. The parents mourn. The widow laments her bereavement. The widow herself dies, perhaps of starvation. The mothers join in a tight-locked circle against the intruder, war-death. The people look with bitter eyes at the havoc of war. As simple as that, the themes Kollwitz uses. But these words do not suggest the power and passion cut into the wood blocks or the damned-up pain which breaks forth in this cry from the artist’s heart. The woodcuts are without doubt a masterpiece of humanist art.

The posters should be considered. They are fine graphic works and have all the virtues of Kollwitz, the power, the dynamic line, plus the monumentality to which she had been drawing nearer throughout her evolution. Deutschlands Kinder hungern! (Germany’s children are starving!, 1923, p. 79 top), Wien stirbt! Rettet die Kinder! (Vienna is dying! Save its children!, 1920, p. 79 bottom), Brot!, Helft Russland!, and Nie wieder Krieg! are among the finest works of art growing out of a practical purpose. If they do not have the chic of the mammoth Cassandre posters for Dubonnet, they have what is vastly more important, passionate necessity behind them. No report of Kollwitz’s art would [be] complete without mention of her drawings. Unfortunately no catalogue for them exists, though a number have been reproduced in various books. From these and from the originals it is clear that in this medium she is a master, as in the print media. If there is any question remaining of the conscious control exercised by the artist over her work, the drawings clinch the matter. They are more spontaneous and more emotional; in the prints the artist has recollected her emotion in tranquillity and found a suitable plastic form for the feeling which in the drawings pours out in a great flood.

Kollwitz’s work is not precious: that is its basic quality. She has never been too proud to do anything needed, as to illustrate books, design posters, even popularize graphic arts by having her prints reproduced as postcards. Her prints have never been restricted to the small edition which creates an artificial rarity in the object; large unsigned editions have been struck off from many of her stones and from steel-faced plates after smaller, signed editions had been pulled. Fortunate indeed that with her social and political ideas, she had an approach to art which saved her from estheticism. Living in the Berlin slums, she saw life as it is for the great mass of human beings. Trained in the iron-clad German technical discipline, she observed minutely and recorded meticulously. In her early years the national romantic inheritance occasionally led her astray as in a symbolic design (No. 29 in Sievers) planned as a frontispiece for

Ein Weberaufstand but luckily not used. The figure of death in many of her compositions also is somewhat disturbing, except that (even if stereotyped in conception) it is used with real linear and tonal skill, as in the Abschied und Tod (Farewell and death) series.

Kollwitz as an artist has synthesized her emotions, her ideas and her observation of life into a form increasingly monumental and plastic. It is not strange, therefore, that at sixty-five she should have completed sculptures for a war memorial. On the contrary, one cannot but wonder if Kollwitz might not have turned sooner to sculpture had there not been a crying social need for the graphic arts, both for documentation and for propaganda. There are critics who say that Kollwitz is a great human being but not a great artist. These people should study the prints; careful scrutiny shows that they have been designed to create lines and tones equivalent to the emotion or idea stated. Because of this identity between form and content, it is easy to overlook the fact that the form was created by the conscious volition of the artist. The power of her line and the varied texture she obtains in the lithographic medium are not accidents; they are what the artist wills. And this factor of deliberate intention is certainly one of the desiderata by which the false Ananias may be eliminated.

As a footnote, a few facts about American appreciation of Kollwitz may be added. As early as 1912 the Print Room of the New York Public Library had in its collections some of her prints; at present it boasts fifteen etchings, two lithographs and seven woodcuts. The Metropolitan Museum of Art own ten lithographs, four etchings and one woodcut. In 1925–6 an exhibition of etchings, woodcuts and lithographs was held at the Civic Club, 14 West 12th Street. In 1933 a selection of prints was circulated throughout the country and shown among other places at the Worcester Art Museum and the Springfield Museum of Fine Arts. Three prints were included in the international print show in Chicago in 1934. In 1935 the College Art Association circulated an exhibition of prints from the collection of Erich Cohn. The Smith College Museum of Art assembled from the collection of Erich Cohn of New York City and from the Weyhe Gallery, an exhibition of anti-war prints by Kollwitz, George Grosz and Otto Dix, which was opened Armistice Day, 1936. A German motion picture, Creative Hands, showing the hands of Liebermann, Corinth, Kollwitz, Belling, Kandinsky, Pechstein, Kolbe, Renee Sintenis, Grosz and others, at work, was exhibited at the 55th Street Playhouse some years ago. Printed discussion of Kollwitz’s work has been almost non-existent in this country, although German periodicals have devoted volumes to praise of her attainments and criticism of the esthetic values involved. A handful of newspaper and magazine entries are all that can be found in the English indexes; and most of these refer to the reproductions of her work, rather than to factual or critical material. Such is the inconsiderable apparatus for study of an artist who in her work has created a by no means inconsiderable monument.

Deutschlands Kinder hungern!

[Germany’s children are starving!], 1923

Wien stirbt! Rettet seine Kinder!

[Vienna is dying! Save its children!], 1920