Self-Portrait

Käthe Kollwitz wrote, "Drawing is the only thing that makes my life bearable." The hardships of her life as a politically engaged, female artist are written into the dark lines of her face and upper body in this expressive self-portrait. 

Kollwitz trained as an artist before settling in a working class neighborhood in Berlin. While her physician husband ministered to the needs of the urban poor, she devoted her life to pleading their causes through her art. The subjects addressed in her etchings, woodcuts and lithographs threatened the powerful. Kaiser Wilhelm II denied her a gold medal at the 1897 Berlin Salon exhibition, and in 1933 the Nazis forced her to resign from her position as the first woman professor at the Prussian Academy.