On a Sunday morning, I quietly made my way through the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art’s second-floor galleries to “Powerful: The Art of Käthe Kollwitz,” on display through Jan. 4, 2026. I entered, sat on a wooden bench, collected myself and looked around, much as I would before a mass.
Julia Jessen, curator of Collections and Exhibitions, notes that the gallery offers “a more intimate experience of the work. It can feel almost reverential or chapel-esque, and that introspective atmosphere lends itself to the emotional power of Kollwitz’s work.” In this exhibition, I went to art church.
Kollwitz (1867-1945) worked in Berlin from the 1890s to 1943, dying in Moritzburg, Germany at the end of World War II. During her lifetime, her work was well-received and respected — so well, in fact, that she was nominated for a gold prize for her series A Weaver’s Revolt at the 1896 Great Berlin Exposition. Although the prize was ultimately denied by Emperor Wilhelm II because he was afraid it would incite workers. A self-portrait from 1893, Selbstbildnis am Tisch (Self-Portrait at the Table), contextualizes her work life: under a single overhead light, she sits at a table working on her prints, presumably after her children went to bed, presumably when she found time to herself. Her head turns away from the viewer, looks up from the paper she holds as if listening for them. Her marriage to a doctor allowed her the means by which to pursue her art, but she still raised children and kept house.
All works are simply framed in black metal or blonde wood with white mats, black ink on cream or white paper. The prints are relatively small, requiring a close look to receive their full emotional effect.
“Both fortunately and unfortunately, Kollwitz’s work remains entirely too relevant to the modern viewer,” observes Jessen. “Her themes of social injustice, hunger, violence, war, death and grief continue to resonate with the events of today, but it is also the humanity of her work — the universal emotions which she so skillfully communicated — that allows us to see ourselves reflected in her prints.”
Kollwitz’ subject matter is utterly ordinary and secular, but she makes both social and personal history sacred. She renders myriad emotions through various print media, including woodcut, lithograph, etching, drypoint and aquatint. The use of stippling and crosshatching individuate workers and personalize them, providing empathy for their plight.
In Sturm (1893-1897), she depicts class conflict through the textures of worker clothing and the solid black of the gates, concretizing the physical and social barriers that divide the weavers from the manor behind the gate. The combination of loose and precise lines makes for a dynamic image, as does the moment Kollwitz captures: the weavers hold stones, one has an axe, and a woman balances holding one child while grasping the hand of another. What will tip this scene into violence, and who will be victorious?
In The Prisoners (1908), men are bound and held behind a rope enclosure. We have all seen this image before in its historical iterations of concentration camps, ICE facilities, Guantanamo Bay and Salvadoran prisons.
Whereas Otto Dix, working in the same period, focused on soldiers’ lives during and after World War I, Kollwitz focused on civilians, namely women. In the woodcut Witwe I (Widow I, 1922-’23), she intimates the depths of despair through the saturated black of a woman’s dress. The work is a modern Madonna in the aftermath of war, rife with tension and sorrow.
In contrast, Städtisches Obdach (Municipal Shelter, 1926) is loose and sketchy in execution, but its subject matter remains heavy. The artist seemingly wastes no time capturing a poverty-stricken woman huddled around her children through quick, gestural lines. She is framed with nothing but vertical strokes that indicate the barest of setting and the edge of the mat. Again, you have seen this image before — most recently in the photographs of Palestinian families in Gaza. Kollwitz exposed the effects of war in all of their magnitude via intimate scenes, while never straying into sensationalism.
On the wall text, a quote from the artist explains her ethos: “I felt that I have no right to withdraw from the responsibility of being an advocate. It is my duty to voice the sufferings of men … This is my task, but it is not easy to fulfill.”
This imperative is not easy for anyone to fulfill, yet her work demands that every viewer bear witness. If you only see the past in Kollwitz’ images, look again.
