She is the most famous German artist of the 20th century and yet an exception: Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945). This spring, the Städel Museum is dedicating a major exhibition to her, focusing on the diversity, explosive power and modernity of her work.
Kollwitz went her own way as an artist: she boldly and purposefully decided not to paint, but above all to printmaking and drawing, and in this she found her way to an independent pictorial language of haunting immediacy. In her art, she negotiated existentially human questions, including uncomfortable topics, from a new perspective, and thus wanted to have an impact on society. This is one of the reasons why the artist and her work were politically co-opted in Germany after 1945 – a reception that continues to have an impact on the general public today.
Based on this complex history of reception as well as her extensive holdings and enriched by works from leading museums and private collections, the exhibition shows more than 110 impressive works on paper, sculptures and early paintings by the artist, including outstanding loans from the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, the Käthe Kollwitz Museum in Cologne, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Sprengel Museum in Hanover and the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, among others. These works pointedly testify to Kollwitz's decision to use the medium of graphics as well as her joy of experimentation and non-conformity. They reveal the specificity of their themes, their formal vocabulary and their compositional dramaturgy. In addition, the exhibition deals with the tension between aesthetics and politics in her work. Finally, an overview of the artist's German-German readings after 1945 reflects on the power of cultural-political narratives.
Käthe Kollwitz, Parisian cellar restaurant, 1904, chalk and gouache on laid paper, bpk / Sprengel Museum Hannover, Legacy Konrad Wrede, Hanover (1947) / Herling/Gwose/Werner
Philipp Demandt, Director of the Städel Museum, about the exhibition: "Apart from Käthe Kollwitz, there is probably no other artist in Germany who has fought for such an early and lasting career in such a self-determined and determined way. Her work had an impact as far away as the USA and China – and was instrumentalized by many social and political isms, especially in post-war Germany. It therefore seems all the more imperative to shed light on this German 'Kollwitz myth' and to take a look at the complete oeuvre of this important artist of classical modernism. This is all the more true for our museum, as the Städel Museum acquired works by Käthe Kollwitz during her lifetime and has maintained a well-founded holding, especially of her prints, since the purchase of the Goedeckemeyer Collection by the City of Frankfurt in 1964. In the spring, our visitors can expect to meet an artist whose work has lost none of its topicality to this day."
Regina Freyberger, head of the Prints and Drawings Collection at the Städel Museum from 1800 and curator of the exhibition: "It is extremely challenging to remain completely unbiased, because we always carry – consciously or unconsciously – our own ideas and experiences with us. This is especially true for an artist like Kollwitz, who has been part of our everyday life for decades through school or street names, stamps and reproductions of her works. The fact that it is one of the great exceptions in the art of classical modernism can quickly be forgotten. At the same time, Kollwitz's work is experimental, unconventional and extraordinarily consistent. Kollwitz refused to create art just for its own sake, so he made the radical decision to work primarily graphically. She chose anti-bourgeois, ultimately also political themes and negotiated them from new perspectives in a memorable visual language that is still gripping today. Her art, like great art always, is timeless and timelessly up-to-date."
20 March to 9 June 2024
Käthe Kollwitz, bust of a worker's wife with a blue cloth, 1903, chalk and brush lithograph with scrapers in a drawing stone in two colours (blue and brown) on vellum paper, Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
