Art postcards | Graphic Cycles – Käthe-Kollwitz-Museum Berlin

Selection of 6 Art postcards with motifs from Käthe Kollwitz’ famous graphic cycles

Käthe Kollwitz presented her first series “A Weaver’s Revolt” at the Great Berlin Art Exhibition in 1898, it became her artistic breakthrough. The cycle was inspired by Gerhart Hauptmann’s play “The Weavers”. After “A Weaver’s Revolt”, her second series of prints, entitled “Peasant War”, appeared in 1908. The most important plate, entitled “Outbreak”, was completed in 1903; the Verbindung für historische Kunst (Association for Historical Art) commissioned her to do the new series as a gift for their members. Once again, Käthe Kollwitz chose a revolutionary uprising that had been violently suppressed – this time the peasants revolts in Germany of 1523-26.

The consequences of World War I were still felt strongly in 1920. Käthe Kollwitz lost her younger son Peter during the war, he volunteered for the military service in 1914 and died in Belgium. She artistically processes her grief and guilt in the cycle “War” and executed the series in 1921/22 by using a woodcut technique that was new to her at that time.

Käthe Kollwitz actually dealt with the subject of death throughout her entire artistic work, in her late work the subject seems almost predominant. In the mid-1930s, she implemented a long-term project graphically: the litho series “Death”. In eight lithographs, she shows death in its full range. Käthe Kollwitz closed the episode in 1937 with the eighth sheet “The Call of Death” and gave the life-marked female figure her own face.

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