Three Women (Plus A Guy) @ MoMA

The life of Käthe Kollwitz spanned one of the grimmest periods in Western history; as an adult German she witnessed the horrors of two world wars, losing a son to the first and a grandson to the second.  The Gestapo nearly imprisoned her and her husband for their refusal to support the Third Reich.  Covering her eyes and mouth seems to be the only sane reaction.

"The Lamentation" (1941-42)

Yet she did neither, so clear-eyed--even at 23--that the viewer may be more likely to turn away when confronting her work.  Kollwitz never painted pretty pictures.  Instead, her artistic credo screams "stop this insanity" from the perspective of a woman, wife, mother and lover.

 

Self-Portrait, Turned Slightly to the Left (ca 1893)

Trained as a painter, Kollwitz abandoned color early in her career.

"Uprising" (state I, 1899)

She began making prints to reach a wider audience and looked back nearly five centuries to the German Peasants War to create a timeless image of the violence men inflict on women. Given the events to come, her work is almost prescient.

"Raped" from "Peasant's War" (1907-08)

She also exposed herself to unrelenting scrutiny.  This work, never exhibited in her lifetime, depicts an extramarital affair whose passion remains raw and undeniable.  She nevertheless persisted in her marriage to a Berlin physician--whose working-class clientele reaffirmed her left-wing politics--for nearly 50 years until his death in 1940.  Kollwitz died months before the defeat of the Nazis.

"Love Scene I" (1909-10)

A humanist and a pacifist, Kollwitz chose the murder of a communist as the subject of her first woodcut, establishing the style which led to her current reputation as a German expressionist.  Her MoMA retrospective demonstrates illustrates her career-defining grief in many different forms.

"In Memoriam Karl Liebknecht" (1920)

The simplicity of this work conveys emotion so powerfully that it's almost painful to behold.

"The Widow" from "War" (1921-22)

Oddly, Wikipedia doesn't mention that her bust is the most recent addition to Wallhalla, the grand Bavarian temple erected by King Ludwig I to make Germans proud of their heritage. The sculptor captures her unflinching, accusatory gaze.

"Monuments of Solidarity," an unusual exhibit of multimedia works by LaToya Ruby Frazier, explores the impact of events over which local communities have no control, including the contamination of drinking water in Flint, Michigan and the closure of the General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio.  It's as much sociology as art.  In this photo, Frazier honors Chicana activist Dolores Huerta for her work as a young woman on behalf of farm workers in California.

Welcome to the wild, wonderful world of Joan Jonas whose weird (in a good way!) work has somehow eluded me for my entire life.  She's 88.

The backdrop of this video shows her at home in Cape Breton Island, which I missed during a visit to Nova Scotia nearly a decade ago.

Jonas is particularly good at engaging her audience, or perhaps this is yet another example of the selfie generation running amok in a museum.

As much as I loved the Guggenheim's 2022 retrospective of Alex Katz, MoMA makes equally great spatial use of its auditorium to hang "Seasons," a more recent work.