Käthe Kollwitz’s art works on the theme of Woman with Dead Child are another highlight. Käthe Kollwitz intensively engaged with this theme from 1903 onwards, in connection with her work on the Peasants’ War. In the early etching of 1903 she already dealt with the motif of maternal mourning and took it up again in 1910 in the etching Death, Woman and Child. In the 1930s, she then worked the Mother with Dead Son into her famous bronze statue, also called Pietà.
The etching from 1903 shows a naked woman desperately burrowing her head into the chest of her dead child, giving an almost animalistic impression. The sculptural effect of the group of figures is particularly impressive.
“Here a female artist has expressed what a male imagination would never have seen, what the man will probably hardly feel and what only a woman, who is a mother and has experienced moments of trembling for a child herself in all violence, could see before her with such physicality.”
Anna Plehn: The new etchings by Käthe Kollwitz, in: Die Frau, 11. Jg.,1903-04, pp. 234-238, here p. 235
Käthe Kollwitz took herself and her younger son Peter as models for this print, as seen in a letter to Arthur Bonus in 1925:
“When he was seven years old and I made the etching “The Woman with the Dead Child”, I drew myself, holding him in my arms, in the mirror. It was very exhausting, and I had to groan. Then his child’s voice said consolingly: Be quiet, mother, it will be very beautiful…”
Arthur Bonus, Das Käthe Kollwitz-Werk, Dresden 1928, p. 7
As is so often the case in Kollwitz’s works, the mother figure in the etching Death, Woman and Child from 1910 bears a resemblance to herself. In a haunting pose — resting cheek to cheek — the mother clutches her child, whom Death is trying to take away from her. In contrast to the charcoal drawing, Death makes a visible appearance here, pushed to the very edge of the composition.
