The Widow (Die Witwe)

After Käthe Kollwitz’s marriage in 1891 to Dr. Karl Kollwitz, the couple established residence in a working-class section of Berlin in an apartment that remained their home throughout their married life. Both were dedicated to humanitarian service, he as a doctor to the poor, and she as a socially committed artist.

Kollwitz on occasion developed her print compositions in preparatory drawings and often used the transfer lithographic process to translate these designs for a new woodcut or lithographic print. The tragic theme explored in the Widow appears in three prints executed between 1915 and the year of this study, 1922. Common to all three is the image of a pregnant working-class widow, who faces an uncertain future. Her frontal pose and outstretched arms evoke medieval German devotional paintings and sculptures of the dead Christ tenderly supported in the arms of the weeping Virgin, but in a modern-day secular icon of mortal suffering.