Kathe Kollwitz

Having stated in my project 3 proposal that I was striving to capture an 'essence' or 'feel' I have been looking at the work of Kathe Kollwitz.  Her images are deeply moving and emotional.  She was a German printmaker and sculptor born 1867.

In her work she depicts the social conditions in Germany at the time.  She draws images of sickness,  poverty and of great suffering and death.  A suffering she personally endured which included her son being killed in World War 1 and loosing a grandson in World War 2.

Self portrait

 Kollwitz’s intensive artistic engagement with the war and the death of her son make clear that all of her work was shaped greatly by her personal life, by events and emotions that she had experienced directly. Thus, after her first two series, which dealt with revolutionary themes, she portrayed increasingly passive states, such as those of suffering, waiting and enduring. A more active tendency returned to her work in the 1930s, triggered by the advent of World War II. Kollwitz was persistently concerned with the themes of mother and child, war, death and misery, and the self-portrait, for example Self-portrait with Karl Kollwitz . The themes were explored not only in her prints and drawings but also in her sculpture throughout her life. Hands and faces served her as vehicles of feelings, with bodies for the most part concealed beneath shapeless articles of clothing.

(http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=3201)

An interesting insight into her methods:

First, instead of making her drawing directly on the prepared copper plate, she used soft ground to transfer a drawing made on laid paper. The procedure most often consisted of laying a sheet of paper over the copper plate, which had been covered with soft ground, and then drawing lines over it with a hard pencil. This action would remove the corresponding ground, allowing the plate to be bitten in those areas. When printed, the lines produced would be softer and grainier than the usual etched ones. Kollwitz extended the potential of this procedure even farther by creating entire backgrounds of texture, often transferring by means of the sensitive soft ground grain of the laid paper on which she made the original drawing. This is visible in all the Peasants' War prints and in Woman with Dead Child as well.
The second technique Kollwitz used during this period to create large expanses of texture and tone was the addition of a so-called "mechanical grain," described as exhibiting "unmistakable rows of tiny, parallel dots. This grain, "only added in later states," has been observed on every sheet in Pesants' War except for Outhreak. Its striking regularity and fineness and similarity to reproductive print, has activated a debate that turns on whether or not Kollwitz, used sorne kind of photomechanical process to transfer, the tone created in this way. Careful study colloborates the suggestion that she did. Most likely, Kollwitz laid a half-tone screen over a copper plate grounded with a light-sensitive emulsion, transferred the dot pattern from the screen by means of exposure to light, possibly the sun itself, and then etched, the pattern into the plate. The rest of the image was obtained from soft-ground procedures, stopping out, and direct etching.

(http://www.mystudios.com/women/klmno/kollwitz.html)

Woman with dead child 1903

The prisoners 1908