Proletariat: Erwerbslos [Proletariat: Unemployed]

Dresden: Galerie Emil Richter, 1926. Original woodcut printed in black on Japan paper. Signed, titled, and numbered in pencil by Kollwitz. Numbered 2 of 100 copies. But one of 25 copies on thick, white Japan, conforming to Klipsten's variant state VIII.b. Plate mark: (14 1/8 x 11 3/4 inches). The great unemployment during Germany's inflationary years after WWI prompted Käthe Kollwitz, a master of social protest art, to represent the plight of Weimar's workers. A numbered, signed woodcut on Japan paper in fine condition.

In Erwerbslos, Kollwitz shows a child with a spoon in his hand, his eyes wide open, behind him are the faces of his parents in the shadows, his father gaunt and eyeless, with his hand around his neck, and a window cutout on the left. Erwerbslos [Unemployed] is part of a woodcut triptych series titled Proletariat. The other two prints, Hunger and Kindersterben [Children's Death], depict social ills experienced by Germany's unemployed in the interwar period. This striking woodcut is from an edition by Kollwitz's exclusive publisher at the time, Galerie Emil Richter in Dresden. There were eight states of the print, with variations to the child's head, this being variant state VIII.b according to Klipstein. This print is seldom seen available outside of institutional collections. Born in Königsberg, Kollwitz began studying art as a teenager and worked in a realist mode, depicting the proletariat. Her father was a radical Social Democrat, and her mother's father was Julius Rupp, a Lutheran pastor who was dismissed from the Church for dissenting from their policies and later founded the Free Protestant Congregation in Königsberg. Though trained in painting, Kollwitz moved through several techniques in her career, including etching, lithography, and sculpture. She made a total of 275 prints, including a collection of self-portraits. Kollwitz was the first woman to be elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts and to receive honorary professor status. She taught there until Nazi Party authorities forced her to resign after she signed the Dringender Appell, an appeal by the Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund (ISK) to defeat the Nazis in advance of the 1932 election. Kollwitz was a committed socialist and pacifist, and her two most famous series, The Weavers and The Peasant War, depicted the effects of poverty, hunger, and war on the working class. She also often found inspiration in her husband's medical clinic for people in need, where she also had her studio. Other motifs in her work include suffering and death, both evident in the present work, which hauntingly depicts the consequences of war for the working class. In the interwar period, during which time Kollwitz was at the height of her fame, she employed her signature style and the populist reproducibility of the print medium to advance her social causes. The present work is part of the 1926 series titled Proletariat. The series was Kollwitz's fourth print cycle and her second series in woodcut where the artist employed dense fields of black to frame the subjects so that they appear as though they are emerging from total darkness. The three figures here are radically simplified; the artist carved only just enough of the woodblock to give the figures light and form. The method lends a strong, emotional graphic impact that matched the desperation of German workers and their families.

Knesebeck, 215/X/a (v. b); Klipstein, The Graphic Works of Käthe Kollwitz (NY: 1955), 206-208, VIII. b; Sowie, 222.