The Theme of Poverty - Essay Sample

Introduction

The theme of poverty in Kathe Kollwitz art is well illustrated in the paintings that she produced. As noted earlier, she developed a cycle on the weavers of Silesian that consisted of six illustrations which depicted the deplorable state that the weavers were living in. It was an intimate reflection of the value she placed and affection she had on the working class. She highlighted the famine as a factor that escalated the poverty levels for the weavers. Her illustration that portrayed poverty also portrayed infant mortality, violent rebellion and retaliatory slaughter as after-effects of poverty. Many of her illustrations depicted suffering children in the arms of their ailing fathers and mothers. They also illustrated sickness and hunger, in addition to poverty.

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Depiction of Misery

Martha Kearns while writing a biography on Kathe Kollwitz notes that the series is unique for its depiction of working-class people initiating, executing, and suffering the fate of their own uprising and for its presentation of women as active participants in a violent confrontation. She begins this series with the depiction of misery, showing an illustration showing the death of a child brought about by the deprivations that come with poverty. This depiction situated her illustration of the weaver's rebellion as a direct outcome of a life cut short by low wages and inhumane living conditions. Hopelessness and grief drive her narrative on misery.

Kollwitz succeeds herein showing the child as an innocent victim plagued by circumstances beyond his control that ultimately led to his death. She dedicated herself to documenting and therefore creating awareness of all mannerism of social ills and in particular their effects within the society. In unemployment a series captured under the cycle weavers, the artist depicts a distraught man in the lower left foreground, his body shadowed, and his features sharply delineated with close, black lines and cross-hatching. We see him deep in thought worried about his inability to provide for his wife and children. In this depiction, the difference between sleep and death for the impoverished in society is quite slim. He mother in between sleep and wakefulness depicts her state of being aware of the thoughts going through her husband's mind and indicating her knowledge of the dire situation at hand. The artist also calls attention to the mother's hands cradling her child's head to illustrate the promise of eternal maternal protection that circumstances may not allow her to give.

The Theme of War

This theme had a personal effect of her as she lost her youngest son in world war II after which she came out publicly to denounce the war. In the beginning, she supported the idea of letting her son go and participate in the world war two against the advice from her husband. However, three weeks int the War, she received that her son had been killed in the battlefield this devastated her causing her to embark on a journey to that resulted in her creating two monuments that were later erected on the graveyard her son was buried in. A few years later, she again lost her grandson to war which also affected her even more. Thus, she did the cycle on the war of the peasants partly from a personal point of pain and also partly as a result of observations she had seen during the interactions she had with patients who were coming into her husband's clinic for treatment (Sheri and Vanpee 2018).

By 1919, her older son Hans was an adult, and Peter had perished in the First World War in 1914. The children she embraces are, therefore, the memories of her sons as youths. This interpretation suggests that while the strength of the artist's arms around her offspring illustrate the intensity of a mother's desire to protect her children, in the face of war's unpredictability along with adolescent and adult independence, all a mother can ultimately protect, and all she may be left with, is her memories of them. The German peasant war was a revolution in the south of Germany in the early years of the reformation. Beginning in 1528, peasants who were being used as slaves, took up arms against feudal lords and the church. She was strongly against the rise of Nazism that led her to experience various mistreatments as a result of her stand.

Kathe Kollwitz identified with the character Black Anna a woman cited as the protagonist in the uprising. The peasant cycle, when completed consisted of etchings, aquatints, and soft grounds. In the second plate of her war cycle, Kollwitz captures the once energetic spirit of the youth coupled with patriotism and sense of higher purpose willingly volunteering for war and the consequences of their decisions later in life. In the second state of this print, Kollwitz identified each of the soldiers by name as her son Peter's friends, who were also killed during the First World War. Kollwitz found inspiration for her final print in text from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, "Seeds for Planting Must Not Be Ground."

She viewed this print as her "last Will and Testament" and completed the work quickly. The work represents the artist's despair and frustration that, yet again, the world was engaged in a war with an innumerable and senseless human cost. The artist interprets Goethe's line as a call to not prematurely truncate the lives of children for the purposelessness of war. Consistent with her activist art and unique to Kollwitz, the artist couched stinging anti-war commentary within the seemingly innocent veneer of maternal love and the domestic environment. To illustrate her message, Kollwitz returned to a motif recurrent in her oeuvre, that of an old matriarch (somewhat resembling the artist herself), protecting children beneath an enveloping cloak. Two of the children on her left look outward, following the matriarch's gaze, suggesting that they may follow her message and stay away from the conflict, benefiting from her gesture of safety. The third child on the print's right, however, impishly peeks out from beneath his mother's cloak; he represents the idealism and independence of youth which may result in continued pointless bloodshed, despite the guidance, hope, and sheltering arms of previous generations' wisdom. This illustration was done as a lithograph.

The Theme of Pain

Kollwitz brings out this theme well and especially so from a personal point of view as she had experienced loss when her son died in the first world war. In her illustration cycle, the weavers, she comes up with an image that showed the amount of pain parents went through when they lost their children. Here, the unending, unyielding torment of parents' sadness at the loss of their child. Every facet of the parents' bodies conveys the physiological manifestation of profound grief, from the mother's completely bent form, her body limp and unable to support itself, to the father's kneeling, but slightly more erect torso; he attempts to hold up his wife but is so wracked with emotion that he cannot face the world around him.

The image is sparse, and the figures of the mother and father are entwined in an embrace which renders them barely distinguishable from one another. The mother and father lean into one another as each represents to the other the only other person in the world able to comprehend the significance and depth of their loss. This piece was done with the woodcut form of print and served to bring out quite clearly the pain the parents were going through as a result of the anguish of losing their children. Following the death of her son, the artist was at a loss of how to pay tribute to her son. Kollwitz began with drawings and sculptural models of a mother with her deceased child but then later decided to focus on depictions of the grieving parents. Kollwitz's memorial materialized both the collectivity and isolation of parental mourning.

Conclusion

Thus, with her War print of The Parents, both parents kneel, with the father erect and the mother bowed in her despair. Neither can stand, and each physically clasps the body, as if both attempt to give comfort and to steel themselves against the overpowering weight of sorrow. Kollwitz indicates that while this deep despair is shared, it remains unique to each parent. In 1924, the artist reconceptualized the memorial, creating two, separate sculptures instead of one joint memorial, and she placed a distance between each parent. The separation of the figures allows visitors to see the graves and/or cemetery - the source of parental grief - between the two.