Making Modernism review – the genius of Käthe Kollwitz stands out like a raw wound

Royal Academy of Arts, London
This badly mistitled survey mistakenly pitches a selection of German expressionist women as revolutionaries – with one timeless exception

The eyes of Käthe Kollwitz, black and hopeless, look at you like messengers of death from a lithograph the German artist made of herself in 1934. You don’t need much knowledge of modern history to guess why the socialist Kollwitz was in despair, a year after Hitler became chancellor of Germany. But is she really “making modernism”, as the title of this exhibition claims, in this confession of private anguish and political shock? Kollwitz’s self-portrait in her 60s is as timeless as Rembrandt’s as a broken old man.

Kollwitz is by far the greatest artist in this survey of seven women artists who worked in early 20th-century Germany. And she has almost nothing in common with her supposed peers. Some art leaps at you out of its own time. Other art stays in a lost place and moment, fascinating as history, important as a document – but it does not grab us. That’s true of a lot of the works here. Gabriele Münter depicts the Munich equivalent of Britain’s Bloomsbury set in paintings that capture middle-class avant garde life. She portrays her lover, the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky, in shorts and sandals in her 1909-10 painting Kandinsky and Erma Bossi at the Table, chatting to Bossi who’s also in this show. Meanwhile, in her 1903 etching Woman with Dead Child, Kollwitz portrays a lumpen naked body in pain, hunched over the infant corpse she grasps to her as if trying to shake it back to life.

Continue reading...