For most of my years in art school, "narrative" was a pejorative word. Perhaps it's because I was in art school in the last days of the domination of formalist criticism, but art that was "about" anything beyond itself was very much frowned upon. "Literary," "journalistic," "ilustrative" were among those terms of dismissal. The artist was thought to have abandoned the quest for form for the sake of storytelling, as though it was some kind of easy cheap magic. The underlying assumption behind all of this was that somehow, telling a story in pictures was the easiest thing in the world, and should be left to comic books.
Well, comic books have become "graphic novels" and everything from the Bayeaux Tapestry to Giotto to Goya to R. Crumb makes it clear that telling a narrative that unfolds over time in the form of one or many still images is no easy task at all.
I taught Kaethe Kollwitz today for the first time in many years. If anyone was a "literary" artist it was her. Her prints to my eye uncannily predict a lot of the storytelling-through-imagery pioneered in German Expressionist movies. I remember a time when Kaethe Kollwitz hardly appeared in the textbooks at all. Certainly there was the latent sexism among the overwhelmingly male cadre of scholars who wrote the textbooks 30 years ago. Even more so, I think it's because she didn't fit the standard Once Received From The Saints modern art narrative. That narrative was about the increasing self-consciousness of technique, the mechanics behind the image, and finally the liberation of form from the obligation to describe.
In no way did she fit into that narrative. In her long life, she saw Impressionism come to Germany. She was alive and in Berlin when Edvard Munch first showed his dark and anxious paintings at the Berliner Kunstler Verein in 1892. She met the Expressionists of Die Bruecke and The Blue Rider. She lived through both World Wars and the Nazi regime, dying in Moritzburg near Dresden just days before the Second World War ended. And yet, the formal language that she used most of her life was decidedly old fashioned and conservative compared to what was going on around her.
She was one of the very few modern artists who did NOT come from a comfortable bourgeois background. Her father was a mason and a carpenter. Her maternal grandfather was a former Lutheran pastor defrocked for his socialist sympathies. She married, at age 17, Dr. Karl Kollwitz, a physician who worked among the poor, and lived with him in the working class part of Berlin most of her life. She had tremmendous difficulty overcoming the reluctance of the German art academies to admit a woman, even a strikingly talented woman.
She is one of the great storytellers of modern art. The peasant sharpening the scythe in the print above from the series she did about the 16th century Peasants' War is a striking example of a use of imagery that would later be central to the movie making of directors like FW Murnau. A whole narrative is told in a single striking image. We need no text to see the anger in this image, as the half-blind peasant, brutalized by his toil, sharpens his scythe for war. It is as though Kaethe Kollwitz perfectly framed and lit a shot like Karl Freund or Gregg Tolland or one of the other great cameramen of the early movies.
The scene of defeated rebels captured and awaiting their fate is even more uncannily prophetic. It calls to my mind Margaret Bourke White's
photographs of newly liberated concentration camp prisoners at Buchenwald. It is a centerless composition where we are invited to inspect the prisoners, and are appalled to discover not only grown men, but young boys among the captives, foretelling any number of scenes from the massacre filled 20th century from the Holocaust to Cambodia to Srebernica. Like a first rate film maker, she encourages us to move across and make discoveries in the scene.
Her powerful scene of a mother embracing her dead child clearly and deliberately recalls Christian imagery of the Pieta, but with a grief that is more animal than spiritual. The pose and the appearance of the bereaved mother is deliberately beastly. And again, we are astonished as we gradually awaken to the suffering humanity in what at first looks like a beast of burden.
I remain amazed that these clearly powerful and moving images remained ignored for so very long. Her contemporaries certainly didn't ignore her. The younger artists collected her work. And Adolph Von Menzel, the grand old man of German realism, paid her the supreme compliment of recommending her for a Berliner Kunstler Verein gold medal (a decision vetoed by Kaiser Wilhelm II in another compliment).
