Woman and Dead Child

There is an acute intensity of emotion that runs throughout Käthe Kollwitz’s work. This particular image depicts a mother cradling her dead child. As the woman’s head plunges into her lap, her face is entirely obscured, creating a universal image of grief. The mother’s position and her nakedness bring out the raw pain associated with the loss of a child. Additionally, the coupling of both misty and more sharply etched lines highlights the anonymity of the mother and her incredible grief; she exists in a world all to her own. As is often noted, the work was also prophetic for the artist: her son Peter would die eleven years later in 1914 during World War I. (“Imprint/ In Print,” curated by Nancy E. Green with assistance from Christian Waibel ’17 and presented at the Johnson Museum August 8 – December 20, 2015)