Käthe Kollwitz

German Empire·1867-1945

Käthe Kollwitz was a German printmaker, sculptor and painter whose unflinching images of poverty, labour and war made her one of the most powerful graphic artists of her time. Born in Königsberg in 1867, she trained as a draughtsman rather than a painter, and after marrying a doctor who treated Berlin's poor, she found her lifelong subject among the working-class families she saw through his practice. Her cycles The Weavers and The Peasant War, made in etching and lithography, gave weight and outrage to popular revolt; later, working in woodcut, she turned the same force toward the grief of war, having lost her son Peter in 1914 and later a grandson in the Second World War. Her memorial The Grieving Parents stands at Vladslo cemetery. In 1919 she became the first woman elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts, a position the Nazi regime forced her to resign in 1933. She died in Moritzburg in April 1945.