German expressionist printmaker and sculptor Kaisser Kollwitz was born in July 1867 in Königsberg (present-day Kaliningrad, Russia). This outstanding female artist is not only well-known in the Western art world, but also well known to many Chinese people. It was the famous Chinese literary scholar Lu Xun who introduced Kollwitz to China.
In the late 1920s, Lu Xun began to come into contact with the new printmaking art of early 20th century Europe, believing that woodcut art was conducive to transforming public consciousness and promoting social and political reform. From the 1930s onwards, Lu Xun began to collect kollwitz prints published to the public, including original engravings with his autograph. In February 1931, Rou Shi, Hu Yepin and five other left-wing writers were killed. In order to commemorate his student and friend Roushi, Lu Xun handed over Kollwitz's woodblock print "Sacrifice" to Beidou for publication when the magazine was founded. This is the first time that Kollwitz's works have entered the field of vision of Chinese audiences. In 1936, Lu Xun published at his own expense the Anthology of Kaisui Kollwitz Prints. It was also the first kollwitz collection published in China.
The Kaisser Kollwitz Museum in Berlin, the capital of Germany.
Interior exhibition of the Kaisser Kollwitz Museum.
Kollwitz's works influenced a large number of Chinese printmaking artists at that time, such as Chen Tiegeng, Hu Yichuan, and Huang Xinbo. In Lu Xun's view, "among female artists, the modern era that has shaken the art world is almost nothing from the right of Kaisui Kollwitz." He also corresponded with Kollwitz through the introduction of the American female journalist Smedley, hoping to invite her to create prints for China.
Weissenbergstraße in Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg district is where Kollwitz has lived with his family for more than 50 years. In honor of the artist, the street has long been renamed KollwitzStrasse, and the park next to the street was officially renamed Kollwitz Square in 1947. In 1958, the sculptor Gustav Setz created a seated bronze statue of Kollwitz, which was placed in the middle of the square. Like most of Kollwitz's self-portraits, the bronze statue has a serious expression and seems to be in deep thought.
A bronze statue of Kollwitz in Berlin's Kollwitz Square.
"This is a helpless and wandering era, I admit that my art has a 'purpose', I want to experience this era, outline this era, influence this era." 」 As the bronze statue in Kollwitz Square shows, Kollwitz remained a serious thinker throughout his life. Her artworks always stand with the people, embodying the lives of the German masses, their suffering, poverty, hunger, sorrow, the wars and deaths they experienced. The sense of compassion and strength embodied in his works is probably an important reason why he can be so highly recognized by Lu Xun.
When Kollwitz was 12 years old, her father saw her artistic talent and began to arrange for her to study painting and reproducing plaster casts. From his adolescence, Kollwitz had a natural interest in the creation of working people as themes. At the age of 16, she began painting sailors and peasant groups. The young Kollwitz attended a girls' art school in Berlin and then at the Munich Girls' Art School.
While in Munich, Kollwitz met his life partner, medical student Carl Kollwitz. After their marriage, the two moved to Weisenbergstraße and gave birth to two sons, Hans and Peter. They live in a large number of working people at the bottom, and many people often come to Carl for medical treatment. The contact with them has allowed Kollwitz to better understand the plight of the people at the bottom and hope to reflect their real situation through his own works of art. Prints such as "Weaver's Uprising" and "Peasants' War" are classic works under this theme.
Introduction of Kollwitz and his family on display at the Kaissui Kollwitz Museum.
In October 1914, her second son Peter was killed in World War I. The loss of his son caused Kollwitz to go through a very painful time. From 1914 onwards, she began creating monuments to Peter and other fallen soldiers. Today, the sculpture, Titled "The Parents of the Fallen Son," is placed in the Vladslord Soldiers' Cemetery in Belgium, where Peter was last buried.
Kollwitz believed in socialist and anti-war ideas, and her own encounters and the successive deaths of the sons of those around her made her more firm in her anti-war beliefs. In addition, Kollwitz was eventually attracted to international communist ideas. In 1927, she was also invited to the Soviet Union to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution.
Poster of "Never Come Back to War" in the Kaissui Kollwitz Museum.
Peter's death was an important turning point in Kollwitz's artistic creation. In 1918, Kollwitz quoted the German poet Goethe's poem "Grain should not be ground", opposing more young people joining the war. In 1919, one of the founders of the German Communist Party, Karl Liebknecht, was murdered, for which Kollwitz created a woodblock print "Mourning the Dead". In 1920, Kollwitz was elected a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts, the first woman in the country to receive this honor. After the German Nazis came to power in 1933, she was forced to give up her position after signing a petition with the writer Heinrich calling for the left party to unite against the fascist crisis, and her artwork was removed from the museum and banned from display. But that didn't stop Kollwitz's artistic creation. In 1942, after Kollwitz lost her husband and grandson, she created the last painting of her life, also titled Goethe's poem "Grain Seeds Should Not Be Ground", which showed a mother with open arms and trying to protect her three children, once again reflecting her firm anti-war attitude. With 16 days to go before the end of World War II, Kollwitz passed away quietly.
History keeps moving forward, and life always goes on. To this day, Kollwitz and his works are still commemorated. In 1993, then-German Chancellor Kohl decided to place a replica of Kollwitz's Mother and Dead Son at the "New Post" in Berlin to commemorate the victims of World War II. In Berlin, Cologne, Kuklar and Moritzburg, there are memorial museums in Kollwitz. (Zhang Hui Chinese/Photo)
Source: People's Daily International WeChat public account