But I still have to work. Journal, articles, memories.
| N° d'inventaire | 21996 |
| Format | 21 x 25 |
| Détails | 525 p., paperback with flaps. |
| Publication | Paris, 2019 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9791092444841 |
The testimonies of those close to Käthe Kollwitz all speak of her laconicism. Her works, on the contrary, speak aloud, they are glaring; they claim, denounce, and deplore. One could quite easily accommodate such a discrepancy between the silence of the private person and the expressive force of her art, if this imbalance, which is less a matter of fact than a critical misunderstanding, had not led to exaggerating the real and powerful political content of her work and to freezing Kollwitz in the image of a committed artist very much of her time, with the consequences that one can imagine and verify, particularly in France, for the reception (or rather the non-reception) of her work. It is with a view to bridging this gap that L'Atelier contemporain, after the publication in 2018 of a first considerably abridged edition of the Journal (which was also the first work by Kollwitz to be translated into French), is now offering the full text. In this Journal, begun in 1908, when Kollwitz was 41 years old, and kept until her age prevented her from doing so in 1943, we discover a personality whose undeniable commitment to her time is both deeper and more fluctuating than one might imagine. Deeper, in the sense that it is rooted in her genealogy (a family strongly influenced by social evangelicalism and Marxism) and in her most everyday life (her doctor husband devotes himself body and soul to his working-class patients). More fluctuating, because it is based precisely, not on an inflexible intellectual conviction, but on a largely emotional relationship to the events unfolding around them. So that to call Kollwitz a Marxist, a socialist, or even just a pacifist, is a simplification that blinds us to the extreme complexity that marks her era, her own relationship to the world, and therefore her work: "One cannot expect an artist, and even more so a woman, to find her way through the extreme complexity of the current situation," she noted in 1920. The Journal thus constitutes a document that is all the more important for understanding her work and her time, as it reveals to us a woman who sees herself no less as a private being than as a political animal and who confronts all turbulence jointly in these two domains. Kollwitz's attention is largely polarized by her family and interior life; and alongside observations on the public, intellectual, cultural and artistic life of Germany in the first half of the 20th century, the Journal collects a number of extremely personal notes on her relationships with those close to her, on her travels, as well as on the confrontation with her work, her anxieties and her phases of depression. The death of her son Hans at the front at the outbreak of the First World War, the source of a haunting that would only find expression in 1932, in the sculpture of the Bereaved Parents, offers from this point of view one of the common threads of this document, and the key to understanding a drama that is as much that of Europe as of her art and her private life. Here is therefore a work that will introduce the reader to an immediately complex vision of one of the great German artists of the last century. In addition to the journal itself, it includes a collection of essay and autobiographical texts, 96 illustrations presenting an overview of his work, as well as around a hundred other photographic documents concerning his life.
The testimonies of those close to Käthe Kollwitz all speak of her laconicism. Her works, on the contrary, speak aloud, they are glaring; they claim, denounce, and deplore. One could quite easily accommodate such a discrepancy between the silence of the private person and the expressive force of her art, if this imbalance, which is less a matter of fact than a critical misunderstanding, had not led to exaggerating the real and powerful political content of her work and to freezing Kollwitz in the image of a committed artist very much of her time, with the consequences that one can imagine and verify, particularly in France, for the reception (or rather the non-reception) of her work. It is with a view to bridging this gap that L'Atelier contemporain, after the publication in 2018 of a first considerably abridged edition of the Journal (which was also the first work by Kollwitz to be translated into French), is now offering the full text. In this Journal, begun in 1908, when Kollwitz was 41 years old, and kept until her age prevented her from doing so in 1943, we discover a personality whose undeniable commitment to her time is both deeper and more fluctuating than one might imagine. Deeper, in the sense that it is rooted in her genealogy (a family strongly influenced by social evangelicalism and Marxism) and in her most everyday life (her doctor husband devotes himself body and soul to his working-class patients). More fluctuating, because it is based precisely, not on an inflexible intellectual conviction, but on a largely emotional relationship to the events unfolding around them. So that to call Kollwitz a Marxist, a socialist, or even just a pacifist, is a simplification that blinds us to the extreme complexity that marks her era, her own relationship to the world, and therefore her work: "One cannot expect an artist, and even more so a woman, to find her way through the extreme complexity of the current situation," she noted in 1920. The Journal thus constitutes a document that is all the more important for understanding her work and her time, as it reveals to us a woman who sees herself no less as a private being than as a political animal and who confronts all turbulence jointly in these two domains. Kollwitz's attention is largely polarized by her family and interior life; and alongside observations on the public, intellectual, cultural and artistic life of Germany in the first half of the 20th century, the Journal collects a number of extremely personal notes on her relationships with those close to her, on her travels, as well as on the confrontation with her work, her anxieties and her phases of depression. The death of her son Hans at the front at the outbreak of the First World War, the source of a haunting that would only find expression in 1932, in the sculpture of the Bereaved Parents, offers from this point of view one of the common threads of this document, and the key to understanding a drama that is as much that of Europe as of her art and her private life. Here is therefore a work that will introduce the reader to an immediately complex vision of one of the great German artists of the last century. In addition to the journal itself, it includes a collection of essay and autobiographical texts, 96 illustrations presenting an overview of his work, as well as around a hundred other photographic documents concerning his life.