ART REVIEW : Kollwitz: Germany’s Mother Courage

It’s fashionable for artists to be politically involved in these troubled times. What they make seems, with rare exceptions, fairly insignificant. Not so the work of their German predecessor, Kathe Kollwitz. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art recalls her pathos and potency in an exhibition of some 50 graphics selected from the holdings of the Robert Gore Rifkind Center.

Kollwitz was born in 1867, just three years before the Franco-Prussian War. The French were trounced and humiliated. Germany was united under the heel of the Kaiser. The artist lived until 1945, watching her country wracked by poverty and pulverized in two world wars.

In many ways, it was in her blood to be a classic left-wing intellectual. Her father had changed from law to masonry, her brother was a liberal editor. Her doctor husband practiced in the slums of north Berlin. She set out to be a painter but shifted to printmaking with its overtones of populist immediacy. She said: “I want to be effective.”

Kollwitz made etchings but they are slow work. In 1901, she made one based on Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities.” Titled “The Carmagnole,” it shows women dancing around a guillotine.

Lithography is fast. You can make posters and illustrate periodicals with it. There is a particularly dense “Portrait of a Working Class Woman With Blue Shawl,” her features half lost in Rembrandt light. You can tell she’d been an angelic pug-nosed baby. Now her face is brutalized to coarseness by a hard life.

Making woodcuts is therapeutic. You can gouge the plate in a fervid frenzy and brood as you print. Kollwitz’s “Seven Woodcuts on War” mirror the disenchantment felt by the social idealists when World War I erupted. It was personal, too. Kollwitz’s soldier son died during the fighting. “The Mothers” shows a circle of women protecting their children. It’s a theme echoed in one of three bronzes on view, “Tower of Mothers.”

Kollwitz was the Mother Courage of her epoch. The novelist Romain Rolland once said of her, “She is the voice of the silence of the sacrificed.”

But she was not a radical artist. She looks most modern in the Gauguinesque woodcuts that flatten and dramatize form. She drew realistically, concentrating on big volumes that give the work the weight of mourning. No wonder she took so well to sculpture.

Kollwitz was political. In 1919, when police murdered radical Spartacus League leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, Kollwitz made a memorial image. Her work was at various points banned and suppressed by the authorities. But it was not driven by ideology; rather, it was fueled by compassion.

She loved to read Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Like them, her art was ignited by concern with the innocent victims of war, poverty and unrest. Her war series shows no soldiers, but the wives and children left behind to hope and grieve.

Relentlessly earnest and slightly humorless, she could drift to the borders of bathos in a poster like, “Parents! Your Children Are Calling You.” Compared to other great socially conscious printmakers, she can appear a trifle one-dimensional. She seems to lack Hogarth’s satire, and Daumier’s sense of fun. She was more focused than that, slowly striving to express the universal consciousness that lay behind her social conscience. Goya, before her, came by it naturally.

Kollwitz was part of a transitional time that dictated certain limitations on her art. Her style grew out of a somewhat literal-minded Industrial Age naturalism. It allows her work to be sincere and convincing as a reaction to real-world conditions. But realism hedged in her ability to express the world of the unseen. She was, so to speak, trapped between Ibsen’s reality and Strindberg’s metaphysic.

Kollwitz’s work doesn’t invite psychoanalysis. The artist seems so stalwart that we are not tempted to suspect her images of representing private obsessions. She is too late in time to believe in the fantasies of the medieval mind even though they linger in German art. She was too early to embrace the private devils that modernism would find in Freud’s subconscious.

Her most universalist suite was “Tod” (Death) a lithographic series done in the early ‘20s. In these eight images, she ruminates on the individual coming to grips with mortality. Those depicting adults--such as a derelict huddled beside a highway--seem to find consolation in life’s end. One is even titled “Woman Entrusts Herself to Death.”

By contrast, images where death comes to children are shocked and repulsed. Their combination of realism and symbolism give them some of the character of editorial cartoons. The artist’s empathy and stoicism overcome the limitation.

We see that Kollwitz’s social conscience had all along been saying one thing: The end of individual life is inevitable, the extinction of humankind unthinkable.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. to Jan. 26; closed Mondays; (213) 857-6000 .