The End of the Task

"The task of Christian art," wrote Leo Tolstoy, "is to establish brotherly union among men." Kathe Kollwitz' prints and drawings pass even Tolstoy's severe test. For more than 40 years, her art helped finance the clinic maintained by her doctor husband in a Berlin slum, and she found many of her models in the clinic as well. Pitiful studies of the poor and starving, her pictures were designed to shake Christian consciences awake, and they do.

A Kollwitz self-portrait, the last she ever made, was on exhibition last week in Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art (see cut). Aged, sick and nearly blind, Kathe Kollwitz had pictured herself in profile and alone, turned aside in exhaustion from her Christian task. In 1945, soon after she finished the lithograph, death came to 78-year-old Kathe Kollwitz.

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