KATHE KOLLWITZ

Art

 

Käthe Kollwitz gave up studying painting and became a skilled printmaker instead, because of her greater aptitude for drawing and from practical considerations. Shortly before moving to Berlin in 1891 with her new husband, the physician Karl Kollwitz, the artist asked the engraver Rudolf Maurer to show her the rudiments of the intaglio method, which she thought could be managed in a small apartment more easily than painting. Intaglio printing entails incising lines into a metal plate, either with acid for etching or by hand engraving and dry point. After inking, the smooth surface of the plate is wiped clean, leaving pigment in the incised areas. When this plate is covered with a slightly dampened piece of paper and run through an etching press, the combined pressure of the press and the capillary action of the paper draw the ink out of the crevices and onto the sheet. An intaglio printmaker is working with only two colours: the white of the paper and the black of the ink. The most basic method is cross-hatching: closely incised lines read as dark grey, while a lighter grey is created if the lines are further apart. Etching, however, permits a greater variety of techniques that produce a far subtler range of greys.
Etching is done by covering the plate with an acid-resistant substance and then selectively removing this “ground” in those areas that the artist wishes to print. When the plate is immersed in acid, only the exposed areas are “bitten,” while the protected portions of the plate remain blank. When Kollwitz began etching, she used what is known as hard ground: an application of shellac that, as the name implies, becomes hard once dry. Lines can readily be scratched into this ground with a stylus, and textures can be achieved by placing a sheet of sandpaper on top of the shellacked plate and running it through a press. As the paper is lifted off, bits of the hard ground come with it, exposing a speckled pattern that, when etched and printed, will appear grey. Another means of achieving the illusion of grey, aquatint, involves sprinkling the plate with rosin. The plate is then heated, causing the acid-resistant grains of rosin to melt and adhere to the metal. The acid eats away the metal around these grains, creating a mesh-like network of crevices that yields particularly refined grey tones.
Kollwitz’s genius as an etcher lay in her ability and willingness to experiment, she combined multiple techniques to build up extremely intricate layers of texture, tone and line. Plates were often bitten repeatedly—some going through as many as fifteen states before the artist was satisfied. Working proofs—generally pulled after each immersion in the acid bath—vividly demonstrate Kollwitz’s painstaking commitment to the onerous demands of the etching process. In 1901, she added a new technique, soft ground, to her repertoire. First used by Kollwitz in Hamburg Tavern, soft ground had been introduced to Germany by such artists as Max Liebermann, whom she came to know through her membership in the Berlin Secession. Unlike hard ground, soft ground is a waxy substance that remains pliable after application, allowing the artist to embed more varied and delicate materials, like fabric and paper. While it is possible, as with hard ground, to run these materials through a press to produce an over-all pattern, the pressure of the artist’s hand is sufficient to impress a texture into soft ground. Kollwitz often drew on paper or fabric laid over this type of ground. During the first decade of the twentieth century, she achieved such awesome expertise in manipulating a broad array of intaglio methods that scholars today still argue over her means and materials.
Kollwitz exhausted her interest in overly complex technique with the completion of her second print cycle, the Peasants’ War.
In the mid 1920s, Kollwitz committed herself full-force to lithography. She no longer needed or wanted the direct tactile engagement with the medium that had been so central to her etching experiments. In fact, often she was perfectly satisfied with transfer lithography, creating drawings on paper in her studio that were then transferred to the stone by her printer. In keeping with her desire for simple, elemental images, she now used crayon almost exclusively for her lithographs. Gone were the complex narratives of yore. In Kollwitz’s late lithographs, an iconic figure or two usually suffice to convey the artist’s message. Though these works are less ideologically charged than her early etchings, their universal humanitarian themes are, if anything, even more widely accessible.
Many of the artist’s prints were issued in unnumbered editions whose size was limited only by demand and the capacity of the plate, block or stone. However, after Emil Richter began publishing her work an effort was made to establish distinct quality and price levels among the prints. Richter published a series of numbered editions in 1918, he also issued special “pre-edition” prints on more costly papers like Japan and Bütten. For the less affluent collector, there were inexpensive unsigned impressions. Kollwitz, to the dealer’s dismay, often agreed upon request to add a “courtesy signature” to these prints.
Käthe Kollwitz ranks with such artists as Rembrandt and Goya as among the greatest master printmakers.

Emil Richter was the exclusive publisher of Kollwitz’s prints until 1931 when Alexander von der Becke replaced Richter as Kollwitz’s exclusive publisher. Most of these works contain von der Becke’s blind stamp in the bottom left corner.