Hey everyone,
Sorry, I’ve been gone for a week. How have you guys been?
Hopefully you all have been well & have had a great week. I’m great, SUPER
pumped for the news that I will be unveiling either Sunday in a special blog
post or Tuesday. Over the next couple posts, I wanted to talk about one of my
favorite art movements & a couple of the artist in the movement; which is
expressionism. To celebrate International Women’s Days, I’m going to start off by
talk about Kathe Kollwitz; who was considered
to be a very important contributor to the art world in the 20th
century. She gave a new meaning to the word expression.
Expressionism is an
art movement that began in the early 20th century. The movement’s origin was
rumored to have emerged from an exhibit in Paris in 1901 and is still used
today in many other pieces of art. Prior to the events of World War I,
artists from this movement had gone against the aesthetic forms and cultural
norms with a deep sense of social crisis. Colors, drawings and symbolic content
were important. Aspects of the artworks that artists had made were really
unique. Some were distorted or exaggerated along with intensified color
and value contrast. The main goal of an expressionist is to evoke a
feeling or message for the viewers to see and understand what is going within
the artist's mind for that artwork. This type of art movement was not
limited to just painting or posters. Over the years it began to evolve
and has obtain new forms of mediums for expressionists to convey what message
or emotion that they want to get across to viewers.  |
| Mother with Dead Child, 1903 |
Kathe Kollwitz was a
German artist, born in Königsberg, Germany in 1867. Her main focus was painting
in black & white instead of color; giving her artwork a feeling of unhappiness,
sadness, fear, anger that her subjects might have felt during that time. She
started drawing at a young age & by the age of 16 she started drawing of
workers, sailors, & peasants that she saw at her father’s work place.
Wanting to continue her studies, she enrolled in an art school for women in
Berlin in 1886. While studying there, she got inspired by etchings created by
another German artist that goes by the name Max Klinger. She continued her
studies at the Women’s Academy Munich from 1888-1890. She taught at the Berlin
School of Women Artists from 1898-1903 & got married to her husband Karl
Kollwitz in 1891.
The loss of Kollwitz’s son Hans inspired her to create an
artwork called Women with Dead Child in 1903. This artwork depicts a women grieving over her deceased
child & holding them tightly in her arms. Her artwork called Mothers in 1919, combines
her own tragedies, the bond between a mother with their child & war. She
used her son Peter as a model to create this etching, which seemed to
foreshadow his death as he was killed at the age of 21 during WWI. It was
considered one of her ironic
 |
| Mothers, 1919 |
artworks. It depicts mothers protecting
their children from harm. The woman in the front represents her embracing
her two children, Hans & Peter. The loss of her sons
influenced her to
become a Socialist.
Happy
International Woman’s Day to all the strong independent women of the world!
Talk to you guys
soon & Stay Tuned!
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Instagram: @Itsmealexblogs
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