Kathe
Kollwitz
Kathe Kollwitz (Kathe
Schmidt at birth) was born July 8, 1867, in Kaliningrad, Russia and died on
April 22, 1945 (aged 77), at Moritzburg.
Kollwitz was the fifth
child of Karl Schmidt, a Social democrat, and Katherina Schmidt. Kollwitz’s
grandfather was a Lutheran pastor, who founded an independent congregation
after expulsion from the Evangelical State Church in Prussia, in which her
education was greatly influenced by contrasting ideas of religion and
socialism.
Soon after Kollwitz’s
twelfth birthday, her father arranged for lessons in drawing and sculpting. At
sixteen, her talent extended towards drawings of the working class, such as
sailors and peasants who associated with her father. Her artistic education was
furthered when she enrolled in an art school for women in Berlin, where she
found companionship with Karl Stauffer-Bern, who was close friends with the
artist, Max Klinger.
Prior to becoming
engaged (and later married) to medical student, Karl Kollwitz, at the age of
seventeen, she spent two years studying at the Women’s Art School in Munich,
preferring her strengths as a draughtsman, rather than a painter, and graduated
in the class of 1890.
Kollwitz married Karl
a year later, and moved to a large apartment (that would later be destroyed in
World War 1), and continued to draw the labourers of Berlin that Karl attended
to.
Through her lifetime,
Kollwitz produced over 275 prints in etching, woodcut and lithographing, along
with at least 50 self-portraits.
Kollwitz outlived her
husband (who died from illness in 1940), and later died just before the end of
World War 2, due to unknown causes.
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