KOLLWITZ, KÄTHE
1867 Königsberg–1945 Moritzburg

Title: Drei Studien einer Arbeiterfrau.
Date: Ca. 1905.
Technique: Charcoal on laid paper.
Measurement: 51 x 71 cm.
Notation: Signed lower right: Käthe Kollwitz.
Frame: Craftsman's frame.



Provenance:
- - Teresa Marquez collection, New York

- Sindin Galleries, New York

- Galerie Utermann, Dortmund (1989)

- Private collection South America/ Baden Württemberg


Exhibition:
- Galerie Ernst Arnold, Dresden 1919


Literature:
- Nagel, Otto (ed.): Käthe Kollwitz - Die Handzeichnungen, Berlin 1972, cat. rais. no. 362, ill.

- Exhib. cat. Handzeichnungen deutscher Meister, Galerie Ernst Arnold, Dresden 1919, cat. no. 141, ill. p. 51



- Early charcoal study of emotive power and exceptional graphic quality

- A characteristic sheet featuring the workers' lives

- Especially her strong protraits of women elevate the artist with emotional precision that had been unknown to art history before





Käthe Kollwitz was, in her time, the most renowned and successful female artist in Germany. Even then, she enjoyed worldwide recognition, and her significance remains undiminished to this day. The artist’s distinctive drawings, prints, and sculptures have become indelibly inscribed in our cultural memory. Like few others, she devoted herself in her socially engaged work to the great themes of human existence: the lives and suffering of ordinary people, poverty and social injustice, motherhood and loss, and the horrors of war and death. Sensitivity and empathy permeate her entire oeuvre; she frequently gave voice to the socially marginalized and disadvantaged, lending compelling visibility to their struggle for a dignified existence.

In her early drawings and graphic works, Kollwitz turned her gaze toward the proletariat with great artistic interest and a keen sensitivity to social reality and human destiny. From an early age, she felt closely connected to the world of “ordinary people,” undertaking excursions through the harbor district of her hometown, Königsberg, with her sister Lise. Representations of working-class life gave her, “simply and unconditionally,” what she “perceived as beautiful” (quoted ibid.). Later, in the Berlin public health practice of her husband, Dr. Karl Kollwitz, she experienced firsthand the harsh and deprived realities of urban proletarian life and came to understand the full extent of its hardship, gravity, and existential distress. She frequently portrayed working-class women, whose faces bore the deeply etched traces of lives overshadowed by worry and poverty.

The charcoal drawing from around 1905 is a sensitive study of three female figures, rendered from different perspectives and through varied bodily gestures. Slightly stooped in posture, their gazes lowered, one hand raised to the chin or both hands quietly joined close to the body in restrained gestures, the women appear contemplative and inwardly withdrawn. Through only a few decisive lines and dense black hatching, the artist captures both the expression and emotional disposition of her models. The burden of existence seems almost physically to weigh upon their shoulders.

The study—which reappears in several expressive motifs throughout the artist’s graphic and drawn oeuvre—reveals not only Kollwitz’s masterful powers of observation and assured draftsmanship, but also her profound compassion for human fate and her sensitive awareness of the quiet melancholy of existence.

Doris Hansmann



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#Käthe Kollwitz #Expressionism #Berlin Secession #Germany #Modern Art #1900s #Modern Art.