page_title: Käthe Kollwitz
section_title: Youth
hierarchical_section_title: Käthe Kollwitz / Life and work / Youth
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: Kollwitz was born in Königsberg, Prussia, the fifth child in her family. Her father, Karl Schmidt, was a radical Social democrat who became a mason and house builder. Her mother, Katherina Schmidt, was the daughter of Julius Rupp, a Lutheran pastor who was expelled from the official Evangelical State Church and founded an independent congregation. Her education and her art were greatly influenced by her grandfather's lessons in religion and socialism.
  Recognizing her talent, Kollwitz's father arranged for her to begin lessons in drawing and copying plaster casts when she was twelve. At sixteen she began working with subjects associated with the Realism movement, making drawings of working people, sailors and peasants she saw in her father's offices. Wishing to continue her studies at a time when no colleges or academies were open to young women, Kollwitz enrolled in an art school for women in Berlin. There she studied with Karl Stauffer-Bern, a friend of the artist Max Klinger. The etchings of Klinger, their technique and social concerns, were an inspiration to Kollwitz.
  In 1888, she went to Munich to study at the Women's Art School, where she realized her strength was not as a painter, but a draughtsman. At the age of seventeen, her brother Konrad introduced her to , Kollwitz became engaged to Karl Kollwitz, a medical student, while she was studying art in Munich. In 1890, she returned to Königsberg, rented her first studio, and continued to depict the harsh labors of the working class. These subjects had become an inspiration in her work for years.
  In 1891, Kollwitz married Karl, by this time a doctor tending to the poor in Berlin, where the couple moved into the large apartment that would be Kollwitz's home until it was destroyed in World War II. The proximity of her husband's practice proved invaluable:
  The motifs I was able to select from this milieu (the workers' lives) offered me, in a simple and forthright way, what I discovered to be beautiful.... People from the bourgeois sphere were altogether without appeal or interest. All middle-class life seemed pedantic to me. On the other hand, I felt the proletariat had guts. It was not until much later...when I got to know the women who would come to my husband for help, and incidentally also to me, that I was powerfully moved by the fate of the proletariat and everything connected with its way of life.... But what I would like to emphasize once more is that compassion and commiseration were at first of very little importance in attracting me to the representation of proletarian life; what mattered was simply that I found it beautiful.
caption: Woman with Dead Child, 1903 etching
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