Desperation, rage, and the ravages of war

Kollwitz works focus on political despair

May 14, 2007|Greg Cook, Globe Correspondent

PORTLAND, Maine -- In the German artist Käthe Kollwitz's 1903 print "Outbreak," the revolutionary leader Black Anna waves a motley mob of peasants with pitchforks on to battle in a 14th-century uprising against wealthy landowners. "Käthe once told me that she had portrayed herself in this woman," Otto Nagel wrote in his biography of Kollwitz. "She wanted the signal to attack to come from her."

Kollwitz, one of the great German political artists of the first half of the 20th century, said her father "introduced me to socialism, socialism understood as the much-desired Brotherhood of Man." As a child she imagined herself righteously storming the barricades, leading the revolution. In the Portland Museum of Art's exhibit "Käthe Kollwitz Prints: Defending the Downtrodden," a modest survey of 23 prints, you see her radical devotion to this ideal as well as her despair at the tragedies that befell her and her country during her life (1867-1945).

The destruction of families by poverty and war haunts Kollwitz's scenes. Unemployed fathers sit humiliated and freaked out before their hungry families. Mothers clutch babies to their bosoms, trying to wrestle them away from death. Her prints are filled with rage, exhaustion, desperation, and mourning.

The exhibit centers on etchings she made her name with around the turn of the century, depicting historic German peasant revolts. In these images, men conspire in the dark corner of a tavern, a raped woman lays sprawled on her back in a shadowy vegetable patch, men pull a plow as if they are farm animals, and peasant prisoners stand in a crowd with their hands and arms bound, awaiting likely torture and execution.

Kollwitz often lets her remarkable draftsmanship -- here an illustrative style seemingly combining Rembrandt, Goya, and Howard Pyle -- get the best of her, as if she's unable to resist the urge to stuff her backgrounds with distracting details.

She's at her best when she pares down scenes to their essentials, as in "Whetting the Scythe" (1905), which shows the face of a woman with eerie blank eyes holding the tool's blade close to her lips as she sharpens it. Her strong hand runs a stone over the edge. She's hauntingly lit from below; it looks like the tense moment before something horrible happens in a movie thriller.

In "After the Battle" (1907) , a woman searches for her loved one at night in a battlefield strewn with bodies. She holds her lamp close to the face of one of the corpses. Kollwitz deftly uses light -- everything's dark except for the bit of light in the woman's hand and on the face of the corpse -- to heighten the heartbreaking drama.