Käthe Kollwitz

These prints express the raw agony that war inflicts on humanity. In The Widow I a woman hugs herself in anguish. Her rounded form and the tender contact of her massive hands over her chest and abdomen suggest that she may be pregnant, lending further poignancy to her situation. In The Mothers, a group of women locked in tight embrace console each other, while two frightened children peer out from beneath their protective huddle. In The Volunteers, four young men, whose distressed faces and clenched fists betray their sense of doom yet determination, volunteer to fight as they follow a drumming figure with a deathlike mask. Grief and torment pervade each of these images, so graphically conveyed by the crude slashes and gouges of the woodcut medium.

Kollwitz's Seven Woodcuts about War is one of several portfolios of prints by German artists focusing on the savagery of World War I. But rather than show the brutalities of warfare and bombing experienced by soldiers, the artist portrays the emotional responses of civilians. Although her sense of loss was very personal—her younger son Peter was killed in combat in Flanders—Kollwitz presents universal visions of the unending sorrow generated by war for those left behind.

These woodcuts—stark icons of concentrated emotion—focus on the anguish suffered by wives, parents, and children whose men fought and died in the war. In The Sacrifice a new mother offers up her infant as a sacrifice to the cause. In The Widow II a woman and her baby lie in a heap, perhaps dead from starvation. Volunteers is the only print to show combatants. In it, Kollwitz's son Peter takes his place next to Death, who leads a band of young men in an ecstatic procession off to war. Peter had been killed in action two months after joining the military, in 1914, a loss from which Kollwitz never fully recovered.

War, Kollwitz’s third print portfolio, memorializes the anguish of those who lost sons, husbands, and fathers in World War I. Its sequence mirrors Kollwitz’s evolution from war supporter to pacifist as she coped with the death of her own son in the conflict. “[This series] is my confrontation with that part of my life, from 1914 to 1918, and these four years were difficult to reckon with,” she wrote. The first two sheets portray a mother holding her infant as if offering a sacrifice, and a band of volunteers marching ecstatically to battle. Subsequent sheets shift to parents and widows grieving their losses. One of the final sheets depicts mothers protecting children—an image of resistance against Germany's culture of military sacrifice.

This work is included in the Provenance Research Project, which investigates the ownership history of works in MoMA's collection.

Ruth Arnhold Steiner, Piedmont, California; given to The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1992

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