German printmaker, sculptor, and draftswoman; the most politically charged body of work in modern German art and one of the most sustained visual reckonings with poverty, war, bereavement, and the lives of working-class women produced in the 20th century. Her career tracked, almost line for line, the catastrophes of her country: she was a young artist in the tenement Berlin of the 1890s, a mature one during the First World War (which killed her younger son Peter in 1914 and left her in mourning for the rest of her life), a witness to the Weimar hunger years, and an old woman when the Nazis removed her from the Prussian Academy in 1933, declared her work degenerate, and destroyed much of it. She died in April 1945, weeks before the war ended.
Two major print cycles established her early reputation: A Weavers' Revolt (1893–97), inspired by Gerhart Hauptmann's play on the 1844 Silesian weavers' uprising, and Peasants' War (1902–08), on the 1525 German uprising. Both refuse the triumphalist or picturesque treatment of popular revolt in favor of compressed, psychologically exact studies of desperation, organization, and defeat. The mature work, after Peter's death, narrows and deepens: the woodcut cycle War (1921–22), the lithograph series Death (1934–35), the stone Grieving Parents at the Roggevelde German military cemetery (1932), and the small late bronzes that culminate in Mother with Dead Son (1937–39), enlarged after her death as the central memorial in Berlin's Neue Wache to "the victims of war and tyranny."
Kollwitz was identified politically with the SPD and the German socialist left, worked closely with the charitable and political networks of working-class Berlin, illustrated pacifist posters between the wars, and signed the 1933 appeal for a unified left opposition to Hitler that cost her her academy post. She was nevertheless never doctrinaire. The work is political in the sense that it takes the condition of the poor, the bereaved, and the dying as its permanent subject matter, and refuses to look away from it — not in the sense of illustrating a program.