Art: Created with My Blood

All her life, Käthe Kollwitz could remember her parents' bewilderment when, as a young girl in the East Prussian city of Königsberg, she first began to draw. They were perfectly willing to encourage her talent, but her choice of subjects was certainly unsettling. "After all," they would say, "life has its bright sides, too. Why do you show only the darkest?" As Käthe Kollwitz wrote many years later, "I had no answer. I simply wasn't moved by anything else."

Few artists have recorded so searingly the anguish of their time, for almost every drawing or lithograph Kathe Kollwitz produced turned out...

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