Kollwitz presented something surprising in two respects at the spring exhibition of the Freie Secession in 1916. The renowned graphic artist exhibited her first sculptural work, with which she approached a rather unusual motif for her.
“After the small work I made in the summer, of which you saw a plaster cast, the small love group, I have now worked freely, and enlarged it to at least twice the size. Now, at last, something has come out that has expression and can also exist technically as I had hoped.”
Käthe Kollwitz. Briefe an den Sohn. 1904 bis 1945, ed. by Jutta Bohnke-Kollwitz, Berlin 1992, p. 73
Käthe Kollwitz was fascinated by the possibility of a new artistic dimension in which she could create an object. Following the sculptural tradition, she first devoted herself to the most important motif of sculpture at the time, the nude figure.
History of origins
Käthe Kollwitz often had long periods of creation for her works. She took several years for the sculpture Liebesgruppe (Lovers) before showing it publicly as her first sculptural work.
Her short stay in Paris at the Académie Julian in 1904 had given her only an introduction to sculptural techniques. Everything else she had to work out independently. In 1912 she rented a studio exclusively for her sculptures in the Siegmundshof studio building in the Hansa district near the Tiergarten.
In the summer of 1911, she began work on a sculptural group dealing with the relationship between man and woman. The “Secreta” sheets may have been the starting point for the first version of the sculpture Love Group. These erotic drawings were never intended for the public and were published only many decades after the artist’s death.
The following picture could represent a preliminary drawing for the plastic Lovers.
At the same time, however, the theme of death also plays into the erotic motif. Individual motifs, such as the woman’s head position, can be found both in the drawing Lovers embracing each other and in works on the theme of death, woman and child.
The strongly intertwined bodies of the two lovers in their sketchy modelling are inspired by the great sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) and combine the extreme posture of the Squatting Woman with the eroticism of the Kiss of 1881.
The picture the artist had created with her quite young, unclothed figures was an unusual motif for the time. Lovers had to be either clothed, mythologically motivated or – since Rodin – at least of experienced age.
