The Story of Art Without Men

by Katy Hessel

Kollwitz was deemed radical because of her subject matter. Documenting the working classes and the unemployed, she was a master at capturing the emotive intensity of her subjects’ vulnerabilities and their experience of hardship. This is most brutally portrayed in Need, 1893–7, a lithograph of a dark, cramped room, featuring what appears to be a mother in despair. Watched intently by others, she grasps her head in her hands while looking over at her sleeping baby, her agony almost palpable. A few years later, Kollwitz made what is, to me, one of the most jarring, and perhaps shocking, images in the history of art, the etching Woman with Dead Child, 1903. The grief of the mother clinging tightly to her dead infant, her head buried in the child’s body, is so powerfully conveyed. Her emotions are so strong, so raw, so intense, that you can almost hear her cries and feel her tears sink into the skeletal, sculptural corpse.