Kathe Kollwitz faces death — again and again — at the Art Gallery of Ontario

German artist Kathe Kollwitz faces death — again and again — at the Art Gallery of Ontario

By Murray Whyte
Monday April 23, 2018

Death stalks every line of Kathe Kollwitz’s rough, rich drawings, bleak and enthralling in their visceral heft. Heavy, indeed, is one way to think of them; standing in too dense a cluster of their coal-coloured swipes can give the feeling of being buried alive.

An array of them staggered on a blue-black wall of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the grateful recipient of a donation of 170 Kollwitz prints and drawings, makes an artful display, perhaps to soften the blow. Nothing could.

All taken from her “Death” series of the 1930s — which almost seems redundant, present as it was in her every stroke — the images are darkly elegant and frank, and at least one chills me to the bone: a woman, wild-eyed, starts as though jabbed with a pin, arms locked around an infant in a primal, protective pose; in the crook of her neck, a bony head nuzzles in, its jagged elbows poised above like a vulture’s wings.

She called it Death Seizes a Woman, leaving nothing to chance, any nod to poetics obliterated in the face of the inevitable. It’s starkly simple and disarmingly intimate — the one thing, in its dark steadfastness, on which the artist knew she could rely.

Kollwitz is the archetypal German artist of our every imagined Teutonic cliché: darkly intense, angst unleavened, all downcast in dour shades of grey to black. The bulk of her productivity came through the first half of the 20th century in Berlin, but she can seem unstuck in time. Though Modernism’s full bloom of painterly experiments from Impressionism to Cubism had by then pushed aside realism as a valid artistic pursuit, Kollwitz remained steadfastly anchored to its hard ground.

Her angst was not merely for show. Shackled as she was to a Germany before and between both world wars — a recurring nightmare of nationalist hysteria, followed by ruin — Kollwitz either saw no escape or chose not to make one, whether on paper or in reality.

Her father, a Lutheran pastor, instilled in her a sense of social duty from the beginning, as he tended to the poor while railing against an unjust system that made them so. Later, married to a doctor who devoted his services to the downtrodden urban workers who had flooded the overcrowded warrens of rapidly industrializing Berlin, Kollwitz’s childhood learnings sharpened to a point. Ravaged by war and withered by the poverty that inevitably followed, Kollwitz’s world was peopled with the sick and the dying: broken bodies wracked by illness and withered by hunger, left vulnerable by forces they couldn’t begin to control.

The artist was not merely an observer to the interminable trauma. One early drawing, from 1903, is called Woman With Dead Child, a taut bundle of bleakest grief, the mother’s body clenched tight around her son’s pale frame. It’s a claustrophobic image, like a tomb, and perhaps her most personal work: her son, Peter, had been the model for the piece; he died in the trenches of the First World War 11 years later, after receiving permission to enlist, underage, from his mother.

Kollwitz could range to the fantastical, putting me in mind of Francisco Goya, who seems a clear forebear; her Death and a Woman, where a nude woman is doubled over in a backwards arch in the grip of a skeleton shrouded in black while a toddler grabs at her breasts, would be right at home in his catalogue of grotesque fantasy.

All is not so always so bleak; small spurts of quotidian joy pop up here and there, a leavening agent that feels if not entirely out of place, then surely a tangent. Her earlier work — gauzy grey renderings of mothers and children huddled shoulder-to-shoulder amid an ashen cityscape, or ennobling portraits of the working poor — are softer but plaintive still, their sunken features sallow and creased.

In the one piece on view here where colour intrudes, it feels like an interloper, a passenger off at the wrong stop. In the piece, a scratchy portrait of a woman enveloped in rough shadow, the blond of her hair and the blue of her jumper are all but swallowed by darkness.

I’m reminded here of her not-quite-contemporary, the great Irish painter Francis Bacon, whose own fixation on darkness, and the experience of war, brought similar critiques to the one-noteness of which Kollwitz has been occasionally accused. To that, Bacon had a baked-in response: “I lived through the revolutionary Irish movement, Sinn Fein and the wars, Hiroshima, Hitler and the death camps and daily violence that I’ve experienced all my life,” he once said. “And after that they want me to paint bunches of pink flowers.”

Indeed, Kollwitz, like Bacon, owes no apology for her bluntly narrow appraisal of her sickening world (she died in 1945, having lived just long enough to experience devastation, again, but not its end). Her theme is one of the few to which great art reliably returns: birth, power (and its lack), sex and, yes, death.

Kollwitz chose both the most reliable and nearest at hand as her close companion, fearless in the face of humanity’s most enduring terror. One piece here says it all: Death Recognized as a Friend, where a wizened face glows ebullient as it clasps the neck of a black hood in a joyful embrace. If you believe, as I do, that the face in the drawing belongs to the artist herself, it says the thing she spent a lifetime thinking: together at last.

Kathe Kollwitz: Art and Life continues at the Art Gallery of Ontario to Sept. 30. See ago.ca for more information.

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