"Käthe Kollwitz: A Portrait of the Artist" Exhibition
Galerie St. Etienne
This event has ended.
Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945), who created over a hundred self-portraits in a career spanning six decades, ranks alongside Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, Egon Schiele and Lovis Corinth as one of the most prolific exponents of the genre. In earlier times, portraits and self-portraits had been intended to affirm a person’s position in the outer world, often depicting sitters with the tools of their trade or other indicators of social status. Following the roughly simultaneous advent of psychoanalysis and Expressionism at the turn of the twentieth century, however, artists became more interested in depicting the inner self. This new engagement with self inevitably engendered a need to distinguish transitory emotional states—so eloquently and dramatically captured in Schiele’s self-portraits—from the deeper and ostensibly less changeable “real” self. Regardless of whether an artist believed in an immortal soul, the desire to create an image of the self that would survive its creator’s demise was often tinged with intimations of mortality.
[Image: Käthe Kollwitz "Self-Portrait in Profile" (1927) lithograph on white wove paper 27 x 19 in.]
Media
Schedule
from April 13, 2010 to June 25, 2010