SwissArtGallery · Documented identity

Käthe Kollwitz

Born : 1867Died : 1945

Born Käthe Schmidt in Königsberg in 1867, Käthe Kollwitz was a German artist whose practice encompassed printmaking, drawing and sculpture. She studied copper engraving with Rudolf Mauer from 1881, then attended courses at the Académie Julian during her stays in Paris, notably in sculpture.

In 1891, she married the physician Karl Kollwitz, who opened a clinic in Prenzlauer Berg, a working-class district of Berlin; from 1898 to 1903, she taught at the city’s art school for women. Between 1893 and 1898, she worked on Ein Weberaufstand (The Weavers’ Revolt), a series comprising three lithographs and three etchings. In 1924, she completed, among other works, the posters Germany’s Children Starving, Bread and Nie Wieder Krieg (Never Again War). The death of her son Peter, who volunteered and was killed at the front in 1914, was followed by a marked rejection of war.

In 1919, Kollwitz became the first woman member of the Prussian Academy of Arts and was offered a professorship; in 1928, she took over the direction of the Academy’s graphic arts studio, a position from which she was forced to resign in 1933. Her work was the subject of the retrospective Je veux agir dans ce temps at MAMCS in Strasbourg; in Los Angeles, the Getty library presented Prints, Process, Politics in connection with a significant donation of works by Dr Richard A. Simms. Three museums dedicated to her work are noted in Berlin, Cologne and Moritzburg.

This profile brings together identity references for Käthe Kollwitz and paintings, drawings and works on paper documented in auction catalogues.

46 references are documented at Dobiaschofsky, Kornfeld, Lempertz. Each record links to its source; the amounts are not a general valuation of the artist’s work.

Works recorded at auction

Kornfeld · Lot 69

Mother surrounded by two children — Bread!

Black charcoal on translucent paper

Original catalogue wording

Mutter, von zwei Kindern umringt - Brot!
Black charcoal on translucent paper

Catalogue period : 2025-09-12

Published result : 90000 CHF

Hammer price, excluding fees

Estimate : CHF 125000

Käthe Kollwitz

Works recorded at auction

Mother surrounded by two children — Bread!

Standing worker with a child, behind them a woman holding a child

The parents — Installation sketch for Roggevelde

Lise, the Artist's Sister, in Bed

Full-length seated self-portrait

Inspiration

Woman's Head and Right Hand

Arming in a Vaulted Chamber

The Widow

Bust portrait of a woman

Märzfriedhof

Sleeping boy

Arming in a Vaulted Chamber

Sleeping child in its mother’s lap

Memorial sheet for Karl Liebknecht

Siblings

Frauen mit Kindern

Four men in a pub

Self-Portrait (after a Great Bout of Work)

Woman kneeling before an image of the Virgin

Self-Portrait, Front View (Recto) — Self-Portrait (Verso)

Self-Portrait at the Window

Nude study for the etching “From many wounds you bleed, O people”

Woman with a Dead Child

Consultation

The sacrifice

The Survivors

Portrait of a woman with figure

Self-portrait

Self-portrait with three hand studies

Fight in the Tavern

Woman on the balcony, self-portrait

Woman with a Dead Child

Head study for the dead boy

Battlefield

Death, woman and child

Death and the youth

The Volunteers

Self-portrait

Self-portrait

Woman with a scythe

Crouching woman with a child on her lap

Sleeping seated child

The young widow — Pregnant woman

The Volunteers

References excluded from statistics: attributions and special lots

Study Sheet with Sketches after Rubens, a Self-Portrait and Two Nude Drawings of the Same Model

Sources and references

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