Today is Remembrance Day. This is the day Australians remember those who have died in war. At 11am on 11 November we pause to remember the sacrifice of those men and women who have died or suffered in wars and conflicts and all those who have served during the past 100 years. In 1918 the armistice that ended World War I came into force, bringing to an end four years of hostilities that saw 61,919 Australians die at sea, in the air, and on foreign soil. Few Australian families were left untouched by the events of World War I – “the war to end all wars” most had lost a father, son, daughter, brother, sister or friend.
Fittingly, Art Sunday today is dedicated to this day and I feature the work of German artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945), who lost her only son in action. Peter Kollwitz, 18 years old, died in October 1914 near Diksmuide in Belgium. The pain never left her. All her life she used her extraordinary ability to express human suffering to champion the rights of underprivileged people. She produced hundreds of dramatic, emotion-filled etchings, woodcuts, and lithographs, generally in black and white.
The Nazis silenced Käthe Kollwitz when they came to power. In 1933 she was forced to resign her place on the faculty of the Prussian Academy of Arts (she was its first female member). Soon thereafter she was forbidden to exhibit her art. Many of her works were destroyed in a Berlin air raid in 1943. Later that year, Kollwitz was evacuated to Dresden, where she died at age 78. Today she is regarded as one of the most influential German expressionists of the twentieth century.
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