Artist: Kollwitz, Käthe (German, 1867-1945)
Title: The Mothers (Die Mutter)
1918/1919
black crayon on laid paper
1943.3.5222
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Student Curator Comments:
Kollwitz used quick, broad strokes with her charcoal crayon in this drawing. Only a few contour lines create the general shape of two frontal female figures. A series of outlines creates ghosts of figures in the background, presumably establishing a community of mothers and children. The mother in the center of the composition is the most detailed. She places her hands upon the shoulders of a young child and affectionately presses herself against him, as if to prevent him from leaving her side.

Created in 1918 just after the end of World War I, this drawing is a starting point for Käthe Kollwitz’s theme of the protecting or sheltering mother. In this theme she reflects on the socioeconomic hardships that the German lower class suffered from the war, she grieves for her son Peter who died in battle, and she petitions to end the sacrifice of young lives to war in the name of German nationalism.