In honor of Women’s History Month I am paying tribute to two very strong twentieth-century female artists, Kathe Kollwitz and Dorothea Lange. Both artists depicted poignantly the human suffering of the two most horrific periods in the twentieth century—the American Depression and World War II. Here’s an excerpt from my book on Kathe Kollwitz’ iconic bronze sculpture, Lament…
“It is my duty to voice the suffering of men, the never-ending sufferings heaped mountain-high.” — Käthe Kollwitz
A single glance at this powerful sculpture is enough to immediately feel the grief and deep anguish captured in this poignant piece appropriately named Lament. Created by German artist Käthe Kollwitz, the bronze relief depicts the double nature of compassionate grief, presenting it as a strong emotional reaction that begins deep within the soul and emerges to the surface to ask, quite simply, why?
Grief triggered by compassion happens when we identify with human beings who are suffering. Some become thick-skinned and indifferent to avoid these tormenting feelings, but for those who refuse to for-get that so many people are going through deprivations, violent death, and daily suffering, lamenting this painful reality becomes the deep-seated reaction when the soul and mind come together to mourn. This is the moment that Kollwitz captures in Lament.
A self-portrait, this sculpture embodies the suffering the artist witnessed and felt personally, time and time again. She was no stranger to grief. She experienced loss early in life upon the death of siblings. As a growing artist she was witness to the struggle and despair felt by mistreated workers, including weavers and peasants, whose battles for basic rights seemed to always end in defeat. When her son died fighting in World War I, she experienced prolonged intense grief and severe depression. Many years later, she lost a grandson in World War II. No wonder death and grieving took such prominent places in her artwork.
In Lament, we see the artist immersed in an unfathomable degree of suffering. With eyes closed, lips pressed tightly, one hand covering half her face and the other appearing to suppress the cries that want to scream out, Kollwitz presents an internalization of the injustices she saw and experienced throughout her life. She seems to shut herself down into eternal lament, sealing in every mother’s pain at losing a child, every person’s grief at having to say goodbye too soon to a loved one, every human’s sense of being crushed by injustice. The pain is too much to bear.
A masterful painter, printmaker, and sculptor, Kollwitz created incomparably moving images of mothers grieving for their dead children. Deeply mournful, these heartbreaking pieces communicated the extraordi-nary compassion of her own response to the personal tragedies she experienced.
Lament is a tribute to her friend and fellow artist, Ernst Barlach, who was prohibited from working as a sculptor, and whose membership in the art academies was canceled due to the growing, unchecked power of the Nazi regime. Barlach died in grief and despair. In this bronze self-portrait Kollwitz purposely ex-aggerated the hands, making them large and heavy to express the sorrow she felt witnessing Germany fall into the hands of Hitler.
Unapologetically honest in its depiction of raw grief and a sense of defeat in the face of multiple tragedies, Lament speaks to the dark night of the soul we feel when loss becomes too heavy to bear. It is a powerful protest piece against injustice and a strong petition for humanity and peace.
