About the Work
The human body is the true motif of Kollwitz’s work. In vivid body language, she staged – or, more aptly, choreographed – it as a timeless, gestural-emotional form of expression. This is especially apparent in the works in which she reflected on motherhood as an existential experience characterized by unconditional, instinctual love and fear of irreversible loss.
When she expands these compositions to include the figure of Death, it is not as a detached vis-à-vis. Rather, Death joins the embrace, which in its dynamic often takes on a virtually dance-like quality.
With this physical – indeed, corporal – ‘entanglement’, the artist achieved a new and entirely unconventional way of formulating the classical pictorial subject.
About the Acquisition
From 1900 onwards, the Frankfurt chemist and industrialist Carl Hagemann (1867‒1940) assembled one of the most important private collections of modern art. It included numerous paintings, drawings, watercolours and prints, especially by members of the artist group “Die Brücke”. After Carl Hagemann died in an accident during the Second World War, the then Städel director Ernst Holzinger arranged for Hagemann’s heirs to evacuate his collection with the museum’s collection. In gratitude, the family donated almost all of the works on paper to the Städel Museum in 1948. Further donations and permanent loans as well as purchases of paintings and watercolours from the Hagemann estate helped to compensate for the losses the museum had suffered in 1937 as part of the Nazi’s “Degenerate Art” campaign. Today, the Hagemann Collection forms the core of the Städel museum’s Expressionist collection.
