Women in Mourning: "Need or Misery" , Kathe Kollwitz, 1895-96

Introduction

Artists have been using women in mourning for centuries as a way to express their grief towards society. Many ongoing factors can lead to tears from a woman, but it is the act of mourning that really represents that something is truly wrong. The act of mourning touches the sympathy in everyone. When women cry, it can be with tears of sadness or happiness, but when women mourn, they are expressing their deepest sorrow.By using women in mourning as a means to provoke sympathy from the people, artists are able to send clearer messages of the true meaning behind their artwork.The five art pieces that I are very different in the fact that the women are grieving over something different. For example, Eve from The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden is crying over being kicked out of the Garden of Eden while the woman in Misery by Kathe Kollwitz is mourning over her dead child.

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

"Need or Misery" , Kathe Kollwitz, 1895-96

Kathe Kollwitz (1867-1945) was a German graphic artist who created artwork depicting the “violence of war, social injustice, and inhumanity” (Encyclopedia Britannica). Her first few pieces of artwork showed the oppression of society upon the poor. However, her focus shifted more towards the loss of a child after the death of her son from a battle of World War I. Perhaps her most famous work is of a granite monument of herself and her husband grieving over their dead child. In 1932, it became a memorial near Ypre, Belgium (Encyclopedia Britannica). For the rest of her life, she produced simple, but powerful, pieces of art until her death in 1945. Many of her pieces are woodcuts, etchings, and litographs.

While Misery was created before the tragic death of Kathe’s son, it still expresses the powerful emotions that a mother feels with the loss of her child. Misery is set in a small, dark room with a poor peasant woman mourning over her dead infant child. Kathe created this piece to express not only the tragedy of having a dead child, but the horrors the poor have to undergo; the mother could not even give the child much needed medical care because of poverty. By using only white and black, Kath Kollwitz creates a bleak and dramatic image. The small child evokes not only sadness but also tragedy. In the society Kollwitz was living at the time, child-mortality rates were very high for the working-class (GHD). By having the mother clutching her head and leaning down towards the child, Kathe makes the woman seem frustrated and depressed. The cramped room with a small window and a spinning wheel behind the woman gives off an obvious image of poverty.

Kathe uses the image of a woman in mourning to relay her own personal feelings about her corrupted society. With the use of a mother with a dead child, it compels the viewer to feel sympathy for the mother. Furthermore, the frustration that the mother seems to be experiencing in the lithograph not only represents the frustration of being unable to save her child, but also a frustration towards the society that led her to end up in such a tragic state. The art piece revolves around the child through the use of different shades of light. On the other hand, it also sparks curiosity about why the little child is in the bed, leading up to the viewing of the woman in anguish. The woman in mourning is a subtle way for Kathe Kollwitz to convey her own message of the horrors of poverty and oppression.

Want to know more about Kathe Kollwitz's life? Go to her museum by clicking (here).

3 comments:

Add comment

Want to know more?

Head on over to Lauren H's Silence in Art. Similar to women in mourning, artists used silence as a way to signify that there is something wrong in their society. Lauren's blog contains another art piece by Kathe Kollwitz called "Die Uberlendendem", or "Survivor". Kollqitz uses her distinctive artistic style to paint silenced children. By having silenced children, it represents how the government has taken away the basic freedoms of the people: signifying that there is something wrong in the society."Speechless" by Shirin Neshat is also found in both of our blogs. Lauren describes Neshat's picture as a silent girl "showing compliance to the government". Similarly, I described the girl as showing submission through the tears that brim to bottom of her eyes. With two different themes, Silence in Art and Women in Mourning, Lauren and I were able to reach the same conclusion: artists use are to describe the corruption of society.

STILL want to know more???

Don't worry, John G's "Loneliness in Art" is another amazing blog you can visit that relates to "Women in Mourning". While John's Blog does not involve any women, the loneliness that is represented through the pieces of art reverberates a sense of mourning. For example, John has the painting, "At Eternity's Gate" in his blog. It shows a man sitting alone in a chair with his head buried into his hands. According to John, the man reflects the loneliness and depression Van Gogh felt. Because of loneliness, the man in the picture is also mourning. The way that the man has his face buried into his hands is also similar to Adam in "Expulsion from the Garden of Eden" by Masaccio. Although Adam is experiencing regret and sadness from being expelled from the Garden of Eve and not loneliness, he still has the same mourning reaction as the man mourning over loneliness. While women are the commonly used figure to symbolize mourning, artists can also use men in mourning as a way to project their despair towards themselves, nature, or society.