Strength Through Sorrow

In the "Northeast Quarter" of Berlin, where tenements are tall and rations short, a worn old woman last year passed her 70th birthday in public oblivion. Ten years before, as one of the most powerful living woman artists, she had been honored with a big retrospective exhibition. Five years before, she had been director of the Graphic Arts department of the Berlin Academy. But the canons of Nazi art were such that, though she continued to work, Kathe Kollwitz had no more exhibitions in Germany after 1933.

Last week a rumor of Kathe Kollwitz' arrest in Berlin coincided with the opening of three simultaneous exhibitions of her work in Manhattan. Whether or not the rumor was a bit of gratuitous promotion, visitors to the three shows needed no prodding to deplore Nazi treatment of the artist. No abstractionist. Kathe Kollwitz is a weighty, marvelously skilled draftsman in the great 19th-Century line. It is her subject matter, always proletarian, bitterly naturalistic and sorrowful, that rules her out of the "Strength through Joy" school.

At the Hudson D. Walker Gallery were about 50 prints, beginning with a set of illustrations for Hauptmann's Weavers which first brought Kathe Kollwitz fame, in 1897, as a proletarian artist. At the Arista Gallery were etchings and lithographs from this and later periods. At the Buchholz Gallery were recent drawings by the artist, including Mother & Two Children (see cut), and four pieces of sculpture done since 1932, when Artist Kollwitz produced her first strong work in stone for a Belgian cemetery, where her youngest son was buried after his death in the German offensive of 1914.

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