IDENTITYWho knows you best?

The image in the mirror v the outsiders view

WHAT IS A PORTRAIT?WHAT IS A SELF-

PORTRAIT?Discuss the differences

Are the purposes the same?

What do they communicate?

HOW DOES OUR EXPERIENCE

INFLUENCE OUR PERSONALITIES?

KATHE KOLLWITZ

KATHE KOLLWITZ

KATHE KOLLWITZ

KATHE KOLLWITZ

KATHE KOLLWITZ

KATHE KOLLWITZ

Who was Kathe Kollwitz?What can we deduce from the images she has created of herself?How do you think she wanted to be seen by the viewers of her work?Are her self portraits realistic?Where do you think these images are set? What do you think her cultural/ socio economic background was?

KATHE KOLLWITZKathe was born in 1867 in Konigsberg, East Prussia (now Kalingrad in Russia). She studied art in Berlin and began producing etchings in 1880. In 1881 she married Dr Karl Kollwitz and they settled in a working class area of north Berlin. In 1896 her second son, Peter, was born. From 1898 to 1903 Kathe taught at the Berlin School of Women Artists, and in 1910 began to create sculpture.

In 1914 her son Peter was killed in Flanders. The loss of Peter contributed to her socialist and pacifist political sympathies. In 1919 she worked on a commemorative woodcut dedicated to Karl Liebknecht, the revolutionary socialist murdered in 1919. Kathe believed that art should reflect the social conditions of the time and during the 1920s she produced a series of works reflecting her concern with the themes of war, poverty, working class life and the lives of ordinary women.

In 1932 the war memorial to her son Peter - The Parents - was dedicated at Vladslo military cemetery in Flanders. Kathe became the first woman to be elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts, but in 1933, when Hitler came to power, she was expelled from the Academy. In 1936 she was barred by the Nazis from exhibiting, her art was classified as 'degenerate' and her works were removed from galleries.

KATHE KOLLWITZ

In 1940 Karl Kollwitz died. In 1942 her grandson, Peter, was killed at the Russian front. In 1943 Kathe's home was destroyed by British bombing and she was evacuated from Berlin to Moritzburg, near Dresden. Much of her work was destroyed. 'It is almost incomprehensible to me', Kathe Kollwitz wrote, 'what degrees of endurance people can manifest. In days to come people will hardly understand this age. What a difference between now and 1914... People have been transformed so that they have this capacity for endurance..... Every war is answered by a new war, until everything, everything is smashed.'

In the spring of 1945, Kollwitz knew she was dying.' War', she wrote in her last letter, 'accompanies me to the end.' She died on 22 April 1945, two weeks before the end of World War II.