"Brotherhood" Lithograph by Käthe Kollwitz

Details

Description

Bold print of "Brotherhood" by Kathe Kollwitz (German, 1867-1945). This piece is one of the Lithographic reproductions of the original … Read more Bold print of "Brotherhood" by Kathe Kollwitz (German, 1867-1945). This piece is one of the Lithographic reproductions of the original lithographs, plate 3 from a series of 10, printed in 1941 by Henry C. Kleemann and Curt Valentin. The lithograph depicts two men embracing, neither of them making eye contact with each other or with the viewer.

Presented in a new black mat with foam-core backing.
Mat size: 20" x 20"
Image size: 11" x 8"
Paper size: 19" x 16"
Numbered "3" in bottom right corner

Kathe Kollwitz is regarded as one of the most important German artists of the twentieth century. Kollwitz created timeless art works concerning the plight of the working class and the effects of war and hardship on everyday people, heavily influenced by her own life experiences. Her most prominent cycles of work are: The Weavers (1898), Peasant War (1902-1908), War (1922-1923), and Death Cycle (1930s).

Kathe was born in 1867 in Konigsberg, East Prussia (now Kalingrad in Russia). She studied art in Berlin and began producing etchings in 1880. In 1881, she married Dr. Karl Kollwitz and they settled in a working class area of north Berlin. From 1898 to 1903, Kathe taught at the Berlin School of Women Artists, and in 1910 began to also create sculptures.

In 1914 her son Peter was killed in Flanders. The loss of Peter contributed to her socialist and pacifist political sympathies. In 1919 she worked on a commemorative woodcut dedicated to Karl Liebknecht, the revolutionary socialist murdered in 1919. Kathe believed that art should reflect the social conditions of the time and during the 1920s she produced a series of works reflecting her concern with the themes of war, poverty, working class life and the lives of ordinary women.

In 1932 the war memorial to her son Peter - The Parents - was dedicated at Vladslo military cemetery in Flanders. Kathe became the first woman to be elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts, but in 1933, when Hitler came to power, she was expelled from the Academy. In 1936 she was barred by the Nazis from exhibiting, her art was classified as 'degenerate' and her works were removed from galleries.

In 1940 Karl Kollwitz died. In 1942 her grandson, Peter, was killed at the Russian front. The next year, she had to leave Berlin due to Allied bombing: her house and much of her work was destroyed. In the spring of 1945, Kollwitz knew she was dying.' War', she wrote in her last letter, 'accompanies me to the end.' She died on 22 April 1945, two weeks before the end of World War II. See less