Mutter und Kind (Mother and Child)

Käthe Kollwitz is known for paintings, prints, and sculptures that depict the difficulties of working-class existence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Here a weary mother and her young child stare out at the viewer. Kollwitz suffered the loss of one of her two sons during World War I, in 1914, which plunged her into a profound depression, although she had begun to create moving images of mothers and children before then. Of her many works depicting the hardships of the lower classes, she wrote, “The motifs I was able to select from this milieu 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.”