1920, Käthe Kollwitz, In Memoriam Karl Liebknecht -- Getty Museum (Los Angeles)
From the museum label:
Following the dissolution of the German Empire and the signing of the armistice agreement to end World War I in November 1918, left and right factions struggled for political power. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, founders of the Communist Party of Germany, participated in the Spartacist Uprising in Berlin in January 1919. After the provisional government led by the Social Democratic Party brutally suppressed the uprising, Liebknecht and Luxemburg were arrested and murdered by right-wing paramilitary forces. With the Communists in crisis, a coalition of parties established Germany’s first democratically elected parliamentary government, known as the Weimar Republic, which lasted until Adolf Hitler ascended to power in 1933.
Although she was not a member of the Communist Party, Kollwitz was moved to create a memorial print for Liebknecht. The artist labored to find the technique that would best express her sentiment, writing: “The immense impression made by the hundred thousand mourners at his grave inspired me to a work. It was begun and discarded as an etching, I made an attempt to do it anew, and rejected it, as a lithograph. And now finally as a woodcut it has found its end.”
1920, Käthe Kollwitz, In Memoriam Karl Liebknecht -- Getty Museum (Los Angeles)
From the museum label:
Following the dissolution of the German Empire and the signing of the armistice agreement to end World War I in November 1918, left and right factions struggled for political power. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, founders of the Communist Party of Germany, participated in the Spartacist Uprising in Berlin in January 1919. After the provisional government led by the Social Democratic Party brutally suppressed the uprising, Liebknecht and Luxemburg were arrested and murdered by right-wing paramilitary forces. With the Communists in crisis, a coalition of parties established Germany’s first democratically elected parliamentary government, known as the Weimar Republic, which lasted until Adolf Hitler ascended to power in 1933.
Although she was not a member of the Communist Party, Kollwitz was moved to create a memorial print for Liebknecht. The artist labored to find the technique that would best express her sentiment, writing: “The immense impression made by the hundred thousand mourners at his grave inspired me to a work. It was begun and discarded as an etching, I made an attempt to do it anew, and rejected it, as a lithograph. And now finally as a woodcut it has found its end.”