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Political Voice and Social Commentary - Year 11 Visual Arts: Kathe Kollwitz

Kathe Kollwitz

Kollwitz made a total of 275 prints, in etching, woodcut and lithography. Virtually the only portraits she made during her life were images of herself, of which there are at least fifty. These self-portraits constitute a lifelong honest self-appraisal; "they are psychological milestones".

Her silent lines penetrate the marrow like a cry of pain; such a cry was never heard among the Greeks and Romans.

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Red Ink

In 1930s Shanghai the writer Lu Xun asked artists to create woodblock prints that showed the hardship of life. Woodblocks had been developed in China centuries before, but it was the more recent work of Kathe Kollwitz that inspired the return to the form.