Death and Woman, 1910

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.