Woman with Dead Child

A mother folds her whole body around her dead child, less an embrace than an attempt to take him back inside her — drawn with the force of sculpture.

Why it matters

Art stripped to pure grief, prophetic of the world wars to come; Kollwitz used her own son Peter, then seven, as the model. He died at the front in 1914.

What to notice

There is no setting, no costume, no period — nothing history could date; only the oldest sorrow there is.

Context

An etching from imperial Berlin, where Kollwitz lived among her physician husband's working-class patients.

About the artist

Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945). Berlin's great artist of conscience, who made the grief of the poor — and, after losing her son in 1914, of mothers in wartime — into images of permanent force.

Toward Modern Art (c. 1890–1935): At the century's turn, painting's last conventions came loose. Sargent and Sorolla brought virtuoso light to the salon; Kollwitz turned printmaking into conscience; Modigliani, Matisse and Kandinsky let line and color leave description behind — until painting needed no subject at all.

Walk the Grand Gallery → See this painting hung in its wing, with music and guided tours, in the full virtual museum.