This exhibition offers visitors the singular opportunity to examine the genesis and impact of Käthe Kollwitz’s groundbreaking print series, Krieg (War), published nine years after her son was killed on a WWI battlefield in October 1914. The seven woodcuts from the series will be displayed alongside supporting lithographs and sculpture as well as rare preparatory drawings and trial proofs. Organized one hundred years after the earliest work on view, this exhibition explores Kollwitz’s artistic development alongside her process of mourning—one that proceeded from very devastating, personal grief to a perspicacious meditation on war and its cost to society.

 

Curated by Claire Whitner, Associate Curator, with generous support from Wellesley College Friends of Arts, The Claire Freedman Lober ‘44 Davis Museum Program Endowment, and The Judith Blough Wentz ‘57 Museum Programs Fund.

 

The exhibition catalogue, Kollwitz and the Women of War: Femininity, Identity, and Art in Germany during World War I and II, links exhibitions on Kollwitz’s work at the Davis Museum and the Smith College Museum of Art, on view during the 2015-2016 academic year.  The publication features essays by curators from both museums as well as original research from professors at both Wellesley and Smith Colleges.

 

Join Associate Curator Claire Whitner for a behind-the-scenes look at the historic, artistic, and psychological contexts of Käthe Kollwitz’s Krieg (War).

 

For press information, please visit: https://www.wellesley.edu/davismuseum/press