The “game-changer” Käthe Kollwitz in New York

Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) as a “game-changer” – for New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and for early modern art: MoMA curator Starr Figura already summed up the special impact of the German artist back in 2022. At the time, the museum had acquired Kollwitz’s “Self-Portrait en face” – for Figura, this was a crucial step in MoMA’s plans to place greater emphasis on the importance of women in an art world often still dominated by men. Figura sees the self-confident power exuded by the portrait as being emblematic of Kollwitz’s artistic desire “to represent the underrepresented”.

Women and the working class, the oppressed and the disenfranchised - these are the focus of Kollwitz’s works. For many people, the way the artist addresses suffering and injustice lends her oeuvre special relevance in view of current conflicts and social divisions. An exhibition that continues at MoMA until 20 July 2024 presents some 120 drawings, prints and sculptures. The German US correspondent Sebastian Moll writes that the exhibition is shaking up New York. And that: “The immediacy with which Kollwitz makes helplessness and pain personal in view of what is happening in the world and with which she fights against despair is striking a chord with people everywhere.”

Käthe Kollwitz has long had ties to the US. In 1902, the New York Public Library was the first public collection in the USA to acquire her prints, and ten years later presented what is thought to be the first sole exhibition of Kollwitz’s works in the country.

Kollwitz also had considerable influence on Afro-American artists such as Elizabeth Catlett, Jacob Lawrence and Charles White. The art collector Richard Simms is also an Afro-American – and one of the world’s foremost collectors of Kollwitz’s works. In an interview with the Jewish magazine “Forward” a few years ago, he stressed: “You don’t have to be black to respond to social inequities and social problems, or to appreciate social awareness in art.” He said that he responded to Kollwitz’s oeuvre as a person: “Just as a human being who cares about these things.”