"I want to be effective with my art.", Käthe Kollwitz
Käthe Kollwitz (July 8, 1867 – April 22, 1945) was a German printmaker, sculptor, and draftswoman, and the most powerful artist of social conscience working in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Born Käthe Schmidt in Königsberg, East Prussia, into a liberal middle-class family, she trained in painting at the Berlin School of Art for Women and the Munich women's art school in the late 1880s before turning, under the influence of Max Klinger's prints, toward the graphic media that would define her career. Her 1891 marriage to the doctor Karl Kollwitz, who opened a clinic in a working-class district of Berlin, gave her direct daily contact with the poverty and labor of urban industrial life that would become her sustained subject.
Her two foundational print cycles, A Weavers' Revolt (c. 1893–98), based on Gerhart Hauptmann's play, and Peasants' War (1902–08), established her as one of the leading European printmakers of her generation. The death of her younger son Peter in the opening weeks of the First World War in 1914 reshaped both her work and her life: the long sequence of prints, drawings, and finally the granite memorial at Vladslo Cemetery in Belgium that she completed in 1932 made grief, mourning, and the human cost of war the central subjects of the second half of her career. In 1919 she became the first woman elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts, the first to receive a full professorship there, and the first woman awarded the Pour le Mérite for Science and Art. Her work is held in essentially every major collection of twentieth-century European art, including the Käthe Kollwitz Museums in Berlin, Cologne, Moritzburg, and Koekelare; the Albertinum in Dresden; the British Museum; the Museum of Modern Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the Tate.