What does suffering look like? Is it a facial expression or a gesture, a moment or a condition?
German artist Käthe Kollwitz saw it in all its manifestations as a basic part of the human experience. It sparked her creative urge while her country lost two world wars, visiting her as heartache for mankind and grief closer to home.
A somber exhibition of her work by the William Benton Museum of Art at the University of Connecticut in Storrs puts suffering front and center. It also explores how she translated her compassion into action. Käthe Kollwitz: Activism Through Art is less about politics than its title implies. Though human misery is often political, the core of the show is not the posters and leaflets she made for progressive causes but universal scenes untethered to specific events.
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GERMAN artist Kathe Kollwitz (1867-1945) was steeped in progressive politics and culture from childhood.
Her grandfather and father were socialists and her own lifelong conviction was reaffirmed through meeting the patients of her husband, Doctor Karl Kollwitz, in a working-class district of Berlin.
She managed to combine motherhood with a successful career as a teacher and artist without compromising her social and political beliefs.
Kollwitz had a traditional academic art education, in which oil paining topped the hierarchy of mediums, but she committed to printmaking because this better served her central aim of producing cheaply accessible works.
“It is all right with me that my work serves a purpose. I want to have an effect on my time,” she said. So she stuck to readily legible realist styles, despite the avant-garde experimentation as an end in itself then being highly prized in progressive circles.