Kathe Kollwitz: Painfully Honest

Kathe Kollwitz (1867-1945) was a German woman who lived through both world wars, losing her son to the first and her grandson to the second, constantly amidst pain since her husband was a doctor. She lived a sorrowful life through dark and changing times, and her art is as painful and raw as all that she saw. She worked almost entirely in black and white, with almost harsh strokes that reflect her subject matter: poverty, loss, uprising. Though the first woman elected to the Prussian Academy of the Arts, she was later kicked out because of the radical, political nature of her art and her opinions, her work deemed degenerate by the Nazis.

What binds her art is not only the subject matter, but the story line through each of them, the personal nature of her narrative. In the mood she sets, the observer shares her guilt as the survivor, the witness.

See more of her work here. http://www.mystudios.com/women/klmno/kollwitz.html
And her biography here. http://rogallery.com/Kollwitz/kollwitz-bio.htm


End, 1897
graphite, pen and ink with wash

Mother with Dead Child, 1903

The Mothers, 1921

Greg Hart Art

Greg Hart is...very incognito on the internet...I had a hard time finding any background on him. However, there's a nice description of what he was going for with this series. In these paintings, he's trying to depict the search for personal identity through family history. We look at old family photos and put our own meaning on them, but their real meaning is faded, blurred, distorted, and much of our family history consists of big blank spaces. Hart is trying to capture the lost feeling. Here's a quote from his site (link listed below): "The repetitive coiled shapes in the paintings represent familial mazes – broken and imperfect. These are tarnished memories brightened, distorted, and reinvented." His use of negative space speaks to the idea of blank spaces in our histories and memories, and that coupled with the swirling, color-blocked stroke he uses serve to unify this series.

Here's his site to see more of his images.
http://greg-hart.com/section/182727.html

Hats Off to Hannah Hoch

This is a nod to Hannah Hoch, a German woman whose art is very politically motivated and (I think) ahead of her time. I discovered her on a list I have of artists that I should know that I got over the summer (still working on it...).

Hcch, an innovator and photo montager, was part of the Dada Movement, which was a response to the horrors of WWI with an anarchist, nihilistic viewpoint. Her art often comments on women's roles, government, and machinery, juxtaposing elements in a way which feels a bit surrealist and is probably meant to make the viewer a little squirmy. It's this sense of out-of-place-ness in space that binds her images together.

She had a few great love affairs, including one with a married man that wouldn't leave his wife for her as well as another female artist. She ended her life choosing to be alone, but I think you can definitely see how her view of womankind and women's fixated roles were influenced by these love affairs in her life.

Here are a couple sites that give a good view of her, though she doesn't have an official site (at least not one I could find).


http://humanities.uchicago.edu/classes/readcult/figure6.html
http://www.missomnimedia.com/2007/07/art-herstory-hannah-hoch/

A Taste of Summer...

I'm doing a drawing portfolio this year, so my focus this summer was more on working in my sketchbook and building up some possibilities for my breadth that way instead of on taking photos. But here's some that I did take! (is the middle one too blurry? It's a reflection, so I like that it's hazy...thoughts?)