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Käthe Kollwitz and me: LONG thread incoming. So my #sovietjewishthing, my long-term graphic-memoir/oral-history #wip is mixed media, right?
Whenever I’m telling someone else’s story, transcribed from an interview with them, I do it as an homage to a specific artist or school of art, which resonates (to me) with the narrative somehow. Now I am no @Rsikoryak, I wish I were.
I have never developed the skill of fully taking on another artist’s style. So I tend to look at artists who use distinct drawing media, in the hopes of budging my own limited style a few degrees. I do my best to slavishly mimic, but readers may not see it at all.
There is a brief Holocaust story in the volume. My Grandma’s Polish village, Sambor, was handed to the USSR in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and her “owner-class” family was deported and abandoned in the Russian countryside.
(it was ironically lucky, because she lost only half her family, while the remaining Jews of Sambor were rapidly liquidated when the Nazis came through).
I was trying to think of what early-20th-century, Russian-ish, possibly Jewish-ish artist to ape. Chagall? Too bright, plus my Grandma grew up urban and secular, not in a shtetl.
I was entranced by the oils of Ilya Repin (whom I learned in research was once derided by high modernists as the epitome of kitsch. Par for the course for my middlebrow ass). But his detail and sharp chiaroscuro would be EXTREMELY hard to do well in tiny panels.
Inspired by the OTHER nonfiction collaborative-memoir Holocaust comic I’m working on, I was thinking limited palette, I was thinking visible pencil lines. The name Käthe Kollwitz floated up in my brain. Early 20th century, European, strong draftspersonship, right?
I couldn’t really remember much about her.
Looked her up, WOW. Not Russian, not the exact time period, but THE ONE. Googling her was like a bolt of light, and made the best day I’ve had in weeks.
Looked her up, WOW. Not Russian, not the exact time period, but THE ONE. Googling her was like a bolt of light, and made the best day I’ve had in weeks.
Maybe weird to say about an artist whose main subjects were failed uprisings, the poor, death, dying, and grief. Who lost a son in WWI and a grandson in WWII, had her art banned, and died right before the defeat of the Nazis.
Her forms are an amazing blend of realism and expressionism (she was claimed by both Symbolists and Expressionists, but never claimed either herself). Her blacks are so black, her light sources are so attention grabbing, and her midtones are full of narrative and mystery.
Omg, PERFECT for a comic. Especially a comic story of poverty, death, grief and unfreedom. I started creating an inspiration board, but also, as is my way, went down an unnecessary research hole.
Is she an obscure artist after being popular in her lifetime, like Arthur Szyk, whom I studied for the OTHER Holocaust comic?
(Because the Abstract Expressionists and the CIA and the Great Man theory of art history are so uncomfortable when pathos is used in service of social justice instead of turned inward as male neurosis)
No, it turns out. Kollwitz devotion never died out, even though it exists in unexpected pockets. For many, she was too close to Social Realism (like a lot of my American art heroes), which was too close to Stalinism.
But authoritarian Social Realism didn’t embrace Käthe Kollwitz either, because of her stubborn focus on things like defeat, weakness, and femininity, which don’t make for good macho kitsch.
(she hasn’t been reclaimed by reclaimers of Social Realism either, because she doesn’t ironize easy. Again-- broads, defeat, weakness: not the stuff of dank memes)
But who loved her in America in the latter half of the 20th century? As I learned in this Forward series, https://forward.com/culture/422874/the-odyssey-of-dr-richard-simmsan-art-collector-like-no-other/ stubborn socialists, civil rights advocates (like Richard Simms, African American dentist and world’s foremost Kollwitz collector) and Jews.
Unconsciously, the needle of my soul always points Jewy.
I say unconsciously, because I feel like she had been forgotten in Jewish spaces by the time I came up in them.
I say unconsciously, because I feel like she had been forgotten in Jewish spaces by the time I came up in them.
I think I heard her name once, in high school art history from my (nonjewish) art teacher, lumped in with like, Meret Oppenheim in the Women Modernists Existed Too category.
Cause I grew up after the Black-Jewish alliance was officially over, after Tom Wolfe convinced American Jews that social justice was an embarrassing affectation.
So I didn’t get to meet Käthe Kollwitz until now, when millennial American Jews finally said we’d rather throw in with the downtrodden. That impressing the Tom Wolfes of the world is bad actually, both practically speaking and for our immortal souls.
OR DID I. The Forward https://forward.com/culture/art/437432/kathe-kollwitz-artist-of-the-resistance/ about a show of Dr. Simm’s Kollwitz collection, contains this sentence: “The shows represent the biggest surge of Kollwitz consciousness in America since a major 1992 survey ... at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C.”
OMG I WENT TO THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART IN 1992. My school’s tradition is a week-long bus trip to DC as the centrepiece of eight grade, the year where civics and government is taught most intensively. This was like the capper of your school career. And mine was in 1992.
But I don’t remember seeing Kollwitz drawings. But I DID spend almost all the money I brought at the NGA gift shop, because I already considered myself an art nerd (or as it’d be called today, a basic-bitch of art. I loved gift shops and am womany and middlebrow to my core).
AND ONE OF THE PRINTS I BOUGHT AND HUNG UP ON MY WALL WAS THIS ONE. I REMEMBER IT SO CLEARLY NOW. It was my aspirational dream of draftspersonship. #käthekollwitz
So soft, so human, so alive, but not remote and illusionistic. The act of drawing is central. The way the shirt goes in one stroke from a fully moulded shoulder to nothing but a gesture of charcoal on paper.
I loved that print, but I didn’t register the name. I didn’t even know (or wonder) if it was a man or a woman. Seeing it again last week was the second bolt to my head of the Kollwitz research. She actually HAS been in me since age 11.
That's the conclusion of this thread. What I thought was a revelation was actually a re-revelation. After 20y of education, creation, and teaching, what moves me at my core is apparently what imprinted on me in tweenhood. The same basic art bitch, allgrowsup with a book contract.
Why should you care? You should not. But it’s my twitter. PS: here’s some panels I yanked directly from Kollwitz compositions. Recognizable homage or stubbornly Miriamesque?
