Kathe Kollwitz is regarded as one of the most important German artists of the twentieth century, and as a remarkable woman who created timeless art works against the backdrop of a life of great sorrow, hardship and heartache.

Her paintings, prints and sculptures offer an eloquent and often searing account of the human condition in the first half of the 20th century. Her empathy for the less fortunate, expressed most famously through drawing, etching, lithography, and woodcut, embraced the victims of poverty, hunger, and war.

Workers Going Home at the Lebrter Railroad Station, 1897

Kollwitz's imagery is marked by poverty stricken, sickly women who are barely able to care for or nourish their children.

Woman with Dead Child, 1903

Kathe was born in 1867 in Konigsberg, East Prussia (now Kalingrad in Russia). She studied art in Berlin and began producing etchings in In 1881 she married Dr Karl Kollwitz and they settled in a working class area of north Berlin.

She came into contact with some of the cities most needy people and was exposed to great suffering due to the nature of her husband's work. Her personal life was marred by hardship and heartache. She lost her son to World War I and her grandson to World War II and these losses contributed to her political sympathies.

In 1920 Kathe Kollwitz became the first woman elected to the Prussian Academy but because of her beliefs, and her art, she was expelled from the academy in 1933.

In the years that followed, her reaction to the war found a continuous outlet. In 1922–23 she produced the cycle War in woodcut form, including the works The Volunteers.

The Parents The Widow I

The Mothers

In 1924 she finished her three most famous posters: Germany's Children Starving, Bread, and Never Again War.

Working now in a smaller studio, in the mid-1930s she completed her last major cycle of lithographs, Death, which consisted of eight stones: Woman Welcoming Death and Death with Child in Lap

Death and Tragedy The Call of Death.

In July 1936, she and her husband were visited by the Gestapo, who threatened her with arrest and deportation to a Nazi concentration camp; they resolved to commit suicide if such a prospect became inevitable. However, Kollwitz was by now a figure of international note, and no further action was taken.

Harassment by the Nazi regime continued, Kollwitz's home was bombed in She was forbidden to exhibit, and her art was classified as "degenerate."

Many drawings, prints, and documents were lost in the bombing. Kollwitz left Berlin moving first to Nordhausen, then to Moritzburg, a town near Dresden, where she lived her final months as a guest of Prince Ernst Heinrich of Saxony. Kollwitz died just before the end of the war.

Kollwitz made a total of 275 prints, in etching, woodcut and lithography. Virtually the only portraits she made during her life were images of herself, of which there are at least fifty. These self-portraits constitute a life-long honest self-appraisal; "they are psychological milestones".