Kathe Kollwitz' Work

Kollwitz’s artworks are about her feelings towards life as she observed it in Germany at the time of

the First World War.  She is an artist who focused on the social conditions of the time in which she

lived and she used poor people, current events and the dark European landscape as the main subject

matter of her works.  To convey the desperate poverty of many of the people she observed around

her she used dark tones and mainly black and white in her drawings, prints and lithographs. 

 She liked trying new and innovative techniques especially in printmaking to convey different

monochromatic tonal effects in the artworks. To emphasise the suffering of the people she also

took ideas from German Expressionism, for example, heavy dark outlines around figures

and distortion of certain features as she was interested in creating artworks that distorted the

proportions of the people to emphasize their suffering.