page_title: Käthe Kollwitz
section_title: The Weavers
hierarchical_section_title: Käthe Kollwitz / Life and work / The Weavers
caption_attribution_description: English: The March of the Weavers in Berlin - Käthe Kollwitz - 1897
context_page_description: Käthe Kollwitz, née Schmidt, was a German artist who worked with painting, printmaking and sculpture. Her most famous art cycles, including The Weavers and The Peasant War, depict the effects of poverty, hunger and war on the working class. Despite the realism of her early works, her art is now more closely associated with Expressionism. Kollwitz was the first woman to not only be elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts but to also receive honorary professor status.
context_section_description: Between the births of her sons – Hans in 1892 and Peter in 1896 – Kollwitz saw a performance of Gerhart Hauptmann's The Weavers, which dramatized the oppression of the Silesian weavers in Langenbielau and their failed revolt in 1844. Kollwitz was inspired by the performance and ceased work on a series of etchings she had intended to illustrate Émile Zola's Germinal. She produced a cycle of six works on the weavers theme, three lithographs (Poverty, Death, and Conspiracy) and three etchings with aquatint and sandpaper (March of the Weavers, Riot, and The End). Not a literal illustration of the drama, the works were a free and naturalistic expression of the workers' misery, hope, courage, and eventually, doom.
  The cycle was exhibited publicly in 1898 to wide acclaim. But when Adolf Menzel nominated her work for the gold medal of the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung in Berlin, Kaiser Wilhelm II withheld his approval, saying "I beg you gentlemen, a medal for a woman, that would really be going too far . . . orders and medals of honour belong on the breasts of worthy men." Nevertheless, The Weavers became Kollwitz' most widely acclaimed work.
caption: The March of the Weavers in Berlin
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