Artist: Kathe Kollwitz.

I have recently had the pleasure of taking in some truly remarkable works of art, by a woman named Kathe Kollwitz. You probably won't have heard of her. Even in her own time she was overshadowed by contemporaries George Grosz and Max Beckman. Some of her work can be seen here on google.

The Portland Art Museum has, for a little over a month now, displayed a comprehensive collection of German expressionist prints, which I have visited three times now. Many artists of the German Expressionist movement used the bold tones of ink on paper to express their critical views of the government and Germany's role in World War I, a war which was utterly devastating to German society. But to compare Kathe Kollwitz to someone like George Grosz, an icon of German expressionism with his ugly, vicious political cartoons, is to compare apples to oranges.

Kathe Kollwitz lost her son in 1914, at the beginning of the war, and her art began immediately to reflect her bitterness at this tragic turn. In the woodcut series 'Seven Woodcuts about War', Her work creates a palpable sense of fear and despair. She also produced a harrowing collection of over eighty self-portraits which range from merely contemplative to utterly haunting. Kollwitz died in hiding three days before the end of World War II.

Kollwitz work does not possess the ugly, harsh and raw quality adopted by many of her contemporaries. Instead we find in her images a sort of subtlety and realism which was uncommon for the Expressionist period, though the unnatural and awkward always seem to come into play when she deals directly with the subjects of death and poverty. Kollwitz was also a contemporary of one of my favorite authors, Hermann Hesse, and shared many of his views on war and the nature of man. Her work and the motivation behind it are among those things which simply should not be forgotten.