Image of Everywoman

"Her silent lines penetrate the marrow like a cry of pain; such a cry was never heard among the Greeks and Romans." Thus German Dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann described the works of the late Kaethe Kollwitz, Germany's leading woman artist and one of the most powerful figures of 20th century expressionist art. But in a way, Dramatist Hauptmann was wrong, as the current exhibit of Kollwitz' work at Manhattan's Galerie St. Etienne clearly shows. Although she left few garlands in honor of Apollo or Aphrodite, her deep cry of sorrow at the death of her son, her compassion for the oppressed and bereaved, and her elemental protest against war would have been understood by all the women who lined the walls of Troy. For Kollwitz' images, somber though they are, are reflections of everywoman.

Kaethe Kollwitz came of stern stuff and kept as unflinching an eye on life as on death. From her grandfather, a onetime Lutheran minister who founded the first Free Religious Congregation in Germany, she inherited a sense of compassion and a strong personal ethic. From her father, a Socialist law student turned master stonemason, came a reverence for craftsmanship and a social conscience. In her married life, she approved the decision of her doctor husband to devote his life to a clinic in Berlin's Northeast working-class section.

She often used his patients--gossiping mothers and children, the gnarled figures of the aged and ill--as her models. But it was such highly dramatic events as Germany's Peasants' War, the 1840 Silesian Weavers' Revolt and the women's dance around the guillotine inspired by Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities that gave her the subjects to express her greatest themes. Kaiser Wilhelm II called her work "art of the gutter," refused to award her a gold medal.

The death of her son Peter in Flanders during World War I struck Kaethe Kollwitz to the bone, calling forth her most moving protests against war. A prime example is The Survivors (see cut), done in 1923, in which even the clamor of children remains hushed before the unforgettable mask of grief. It was a face the Nazis could not bear to see, and they banned her works. Invited to escape to the U.S., Kollwitz chose to remain in Germany, fearful that the Nazis would persecute her family if she left. In 1943, shortly before Allied bombers destroyed her Berlin home and most of her own collection, she moved to Schloss Moritzburg near Dresden, where she died in 1945 at 77.

The fact that last week's exhibition was a near sellout was a tribute to the enduring meaning of Kaethe Kollwitz' vision. For in her way, she has given a woman's view as impassioned as Goya's horror of war, one that affirms the value of the human spirit, even while it grimly insists that revolt too often ends in chains, that death must finally triumph over life.

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