The Beautiful and the Damned

I both love and hate lists. They’re great fun to compile but always lead to an argument, which can be great fun, too, but not always. Someone always gets left out. A braver man than I, Stephen Farthing, editor of 1001 Paintings You Must See Before You Die, slaps a new bull’s eye on his back with 501 Great Artists: A Comprehensive Guide to the Giants of the Art World. As with his previous book, the “and one” acknowledges that there’s always “one more” name that should have been thrown into the mix. Farthing and his minions, however, ably take up the challenge and bear the brunt of critique, to which I shall add here. 501 Great Artists, however, unarguably achieves its primary goal—getting people to talk about artists and art. From the rank beginner to the rankled expert, 501 Great Artists will get you flipping pages one way or another and before long you’ll find yourself hooked on new discoveries or griping over new injustices. “The reach is chronologically and geographically vast,” Geoff Dyer writes in his forward. “We begin in China over a thousand years ago and end, in Iran, with an artist born in 1974—a welcome reminder that the word ‘artists’ is not invisibly or tacitly preceeded, either in the book’s title or its conception, by the word ‘Western.’” Noble in conception, 501 Great Artists’ sins of commission and omission all fall under the category of crimes of passion—passion about art in all its incarnations.

Starting with Dong Yuan in China circa 900 AD and wrapping up with Shirana Shahbazi, born in the age of Disco, 501 Great Artists does it’s best to span the centuries and circle the globe with individual artists as the touchpoints. “In the end, art history boils down to people: writers, patrons, collectors, artists, and then finally the audience,” Farthing writes in his brief introduction, “without the people there is no art.” Almost every artist earns a full page of coverage, with some, such as David Hockney (above), earning more thanks to their greater importance in the scheme of art history. Beneath each artist’s name appears their lifespan, “artistic style,” a list of masterworks, a short essay, and maybe a sidebar with an interesting factoid or two. Oversized text features quotes either from the artist or from some critic on that artist, ranging from Giorgio Vasari to Sister Wendy Beckett. I found myself at one point just scanning for those quotes. (Two favorites—Henry James on Correggio, “That’s a very pleasant life, to renounce everything but Correggio!” and Carl Jung on Hieronymus Bosch, “The master of the monstrous.. the discoverer of the unconscious.”) The format really does humanize art history, giving flesh and blood to the cold facts and reinforcing the idea that art is of the people, by the people, and for the people. As comforting as it is to come across familiar names, it’s even more enjoyable to experience the thrill of discovering a new star situated within a constellation you already thought you knew too well.

It was heartening to see some names included that normally don’t find a place in the pantheon. Jean-Leon Gerome and Hans Hofmann deserve spots as much as for their influence as teachers as for their own art. Alfred Sisley and Emile Bernard emerge from the Impressionist tangle. The underrated George Bellows finds a place on this world stage, yet Robert Henri and John Sloan, equally influential members of the Ashcan School, fail to make the cut. As much as I applaud the visionary and deserved inclusion of composer John Cage (above, Cage’s Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel, a 1969 tribute to his friend Marcel Duchamp), I can’t agree with the logic of some of the choices. Farthing is British and I anticipated the same Anglocentrism demonstrated in 1001 Paintings, but what kind of good Englishman picks John Flaxman over Sir Thomas Lawrence? Do you really need both James Gilray and Thomas Rowlandson to acknowledge British political caricature post-Hogarth? Can Art Nouveau be understood without Aubrey Beardsley? In photography, is Edward Steichen more important than Alfred Stieglitz, Eugene Atget, and Walker Evans? I’m sure that the Guerrilla Girls would take great issue with the exclusion of Kathe Kollwitz (below, Kollwitz’s Self-Portrait With Hand on Brow, 1910), the otherwise fine selection of women artists notwithstanding. Although the essays are generally well written, clunkers such as calling Thomas Eakins “an unflattering portrait painter” that no Eakins’ authority would accept slip through.

The most dangerous part of this very dangerous list comes when dealing with contemporary artists. Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst eat up several pages each thanks more to their notoriety than greatness next to the giants of the past. Hirst’s section almost comically includes among his “themes” “pharmaceuticals, narcotics, love, the nature of existence, mortality, and religion,” which pretty much covers everything. All the Young British Artists appear as well as anyone within sniffing distance of the Turner Prize. Among all these Brits, couldn’t a slot have been found for Kehinde Wiley, the great young African-American artist? 501 Great Artists does a marvelous job of finding the fine young artists of the Middle East, but I found myself wondering how many deserving artists such as Wiley fell short in the barrage of Damien Hirst wannabees. As I said, lists are dangerous, but trying to write art history on the fly, literally trying to predict the future giants, borders on madness. Farthing courageously accepts the challenge and that courage should earn him some forgiveness for perceived failings. 501 Great Artists belongs on the shelf of any art lover, especially that of a young person to whom these artists are often just names on a museum wall or footnotes in a book. Farthing restores the human touch to these works and incites argument in a good way, calling out those who love art to pronounce or defend their territory. 501 Great Artists restores the giants to life size and allows us to see them again as the wonderful, fallible, contextualized, and context-breaking people they once were.

[Many thanks to Barron’s for providing me with a review copy of 501 Great Artists: A Comprehensive Guide to the Giants of the Art World, edited by Stephen Farthing.]

Mother and Child Reunion

When The Guerrilla Girls first began to practice their entertaining and enlightening brand of feminist art protest, they decided to protect their identities behind gorilla masks and to assume the names of the great female artists of the past. The two leading Guerrilla Girls assumed the names of their favorite inspirations—Frida Kahlo and Kathe Kollwitz. Born July 8, 1867, Kollwitz lacks the Hollywood treatment and colorful life history of Kahlo, but deserves equal recognition based on her lifetime of artistry and relentless humanism. Kollwitz’s Self-Portrait with Hand on Forehead (above, from 1910) belongs to a set of self-portraits that lack the overt psychodrama of Kahlo’s self-portraits but quietly add up to the same single document of a woman dealing with the forces opposing her, both as an artist and as a woman. Kollwitz dealt with the added horror of seeing her native Germany plunge the world into two world wars, which took her son and her grandson from her. Whereas most of the German Expressionists were men dealing with the wages of war, Kollwitz as an Expressionist woman gave a whole new perspective as a mother.

Kollwitz married her husband, Karl, a doctor in 1891. Karl specialized in treating the poor people of Berlin. Kathe watched these poor people seek her husband’s help and took those observations to help them in her own way. Works such as Hunger (above, from 1925) depict in stark black and white woodcuts the harsh reality of poverty and starvation. The bulging eyes of the little girl and the reduction of her parents to a few simple lines as they disappear into the black void conveys the reality of hunger like few other images ever have. Kollwitz identified with these people and championed their causes in series of works based on peasant revolutions and workers’ strikes. She wore accusations of socialism and communism as badges of honor, which soon became dangerous bull’s eyes as the Nazis assumed power.

First, the Nazis stripped Kollwitz of her teaching position. Later, they denied her outlets to sell her work. The Gestapo even threatened Kollwitz and her husband with internment in a concentration camp, but her international fame saved her. Sadly, allied bombing of Germany destroyed many of her works. Kollwitz died in 1943, never seeing her country freed from Nazi tyranny. In many ways, Kollwitz became the mother of her country, giving shape to the maternal instinct of German mothers faced with the destruction of their families in works such as Mother and Daughter (above, from 1919). Rather than present the bond between a woman and her children in flowery terms of “soft” femininity, Kollwitz shows the strength of the bond with her stark black and white imagery. Kollwitz loved with a tough love that even death could not tear asunder. Such universal emotions allow Kollwitz’s art and its message to cross both national borders and historical eras as long as mothers continue to lose sons and daughters in senseless conflict. All Kollwitz is saying is such works is give peace a chance.

A Greed for Life

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, Self-Portrait with Red Hat, 1938, oil and charcoal on canvas, 50.7 x 35.5 cm. Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust, London

In Self-Portrait with Red Hat (above), the artist Marie-Louise von Motesiczky looks penetratingly at the viewer with her large, dark eyes and touches the brim of her hat, “as if in a gesture of farewell to the country she had been forced to leave behind,” writes Jill Lloyd in The Undiscovered Expressionist: A Life of Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, the first biography and in-depth study of the woman Max Beckmann, mentor and friend, once believed could be Germany’s greatest female artist since Paula Modersohn-Becker. Motesiczky, forced to flee her native land to escape Nazi persecution, constantly finds herself in a state of semi-exile—from the aristocratic world of her lineage in her choice of the bohemian life of an artist yet also from the wilder excesses of modern art in the fundamental conservatism of her artistic practice. Caught between so many different worlds, Motesiczky provides a unique tale of the conflicts the modern woman artist faced in the early twentieth century.

Motesiczky descends from a long line of powerful, intelligent women. “These gifted women were undoubtedlyan inspiration to Marie-Louise,” Lloyd writes, “but their frustrations and resulting histories of depression and psychosomatic illnesses cast a shadow over her life.” Sigmund Freud treats one of her grandmothers among his earliest patients. Her father, a talented musician, allegedly plays with Brahms himself. Several of the women in her family history take illustrious writers as lovers, something Motesiczky herself does in a 40-year relationship with Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti. Although her family always surrounds itself with the great artists of Austria, Motesiczky maintains the essentially conservative values of her family, which lead to a life-long suspicion of “intellectual” abstract art. When Max Beckmann visits the family in 1920, however, Marie-Louise begins to see possibilities in a career in art.

After meeting Beckmann, Motesiczky travels to Holland and encounters the world of Van Gogh first hand. “It was Van Gogh’s sun which in the cold Hague spring was a revelation to me,” she writes in letters home. Like many German artists of the time, Van Gogh’s life story and strikingly powerful letters, newly translated into German, spark the imagination of Motesiczky. Lloyd does a great job in capturing the spirit of Van Gogh-mania in its early years, something she wrote on at length in the catalogue to the exhibition Van Gogh and Expressionism at the Neue Galerie last year (which I reviewed here). The expressive power of Motesiczky’s Self-Portrait with Red Hat owes much to Van Gogh’s own revealing self-portraits with hats and other accessories.

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, The Travellers, 1940, oil on canvas, 66.7 x 75.3 cm. Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust, London

In the late 1920s through the 1930s, Motesiczky lives in wild Berlin, thriving in the bohemian atmosphere that shocks her conservative family. A photo of Motesiczky frolicking topless shows just how far she had come from the staid halls of her family’s wealthy home. In The Balcony (painted in 1929) Motesiczky paints herself nude, peeling away the final layers of “respectability” and embracing the life of an artist free of all constraint. Around 1934, Motesiczky herself undergoes psychoanalysis, following which her paintings take on a more introspective feel. The increasing power of the Nazis may have also contributed to her increased thoughtfulness. After his inclusion in the “Degenerate Art” exhibition in 1937, Beckmann flees Germany and Motesiczky follows a year later with her mother and childhood nurse in tow. The Travellers (above) captures some of the absurdity of this exodus from the life and traditions Motesiczky and her family knew. The nude figure in the center holds a sausage, as if it were a treasured possession. Landing finally in England, Motesiczky finds solace in the German artistic community already there, including the artist Oskar Kokoschka and the writer Canetti, whom she meets in 1939. Lloyd mines Canetti’s memoir Party in the Blitz for much of the feeling of what it was to be a German in England at that time. In the midst of all the uncertainty of homelessness, Canetti provides an anchor for Marie-Louise. “In the inauspicious circumstances of exile, her belief in Canetti’s powers as a writer seems to have filled the gap she perceived in her life,” Lloyd writes. Both Motesiczky and Canetti unwaveringly believe in art’s power to give meaning to the world and fervently hold on to that faith over the next 40 years of their life together—a relationship based largely on self-deception, as Canetti remained married to his wife Vera and then married another woman after Vera’s death rather than Marie-Louise.

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, The Old Song, 1959, oil on canvas, 101.7 x 152.6 cm. Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust, London

Motesiczky decides to remain in England after the war. Her mother, bedridden for much of her life, becomes one of her greatest subjects. In a sequence beginning in 1929, Motesiczky paints her mother over the course of the next 50 years in works such as The Old Song (above). Motesiczky paints The Old Song after an inspirational visit to the Louvre, deciding to make “allegories just as a pretext—and leaving the symbolic to look after itself.” In an honest, tender examination of the dynamics of aging similar to that of the self-portraits of Rembrandt, whom Motesiczky loved, Motesiczky paints her mother becoming more and more child-like and simple in spirit as well as appearance as the end nears. Throughout, Motesiczky strives, as she put it, “to capture mother’s yearning expression, that almost greed for life.” The joy of life behind so much of Motesiczky’s paintings, even in the face of displacement and failed affairs, proves that she too shared in her mother’s greed for living.

When Motesiczky’s mother finally dies in 1978, she finds herself completely “free” for the first time in her life at the age of 72. Marie-Louise gives “full rein in later years to the unconventionality that was part of her family tradition, taking advantage at last of the freedom that was her émigré status and advancing years afforded her.” Travels to India, Turkey, Egypt, and Israel add adventure to her later years. Although unable to identify with the feminist revolution of the 1960s, Motesiczky appreciates the modern woman’s sense of independence, perhaps wondering what she would have accomplished if she had been born in a different time and place.

Although some recognition comes to Motesiczky and other members of the so-called “lost generation” of German artists whose lives were interrupted by the Nazi era through exhibitions of the 1980s and the neo-Expressionism of the 1980s leads to renewed interest in the German Expressionists, Motesiczky’s art has remains undiscovered for the most part. Motesiczky founds the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust in 1992 to protect her legacy. The Trust owns most of her works and continues to promote her artistic vision today since her death in 1996.

Within German art, Motesiczky’s painting stands up against the finest of the male German Expressionists and certainly can challenge Modersohn-Becker or even Kathe Kollwitz for the title of greatest modern woman German artist. Lloyd analyzes Motesiczky’s works perceptively and places her within the larger context very well—quite a task due to the unconventionality of the subject herself and the male-dominated nature of German Expressionism. I found myself frequently comparing Motesiczky’s art to that of another unconventional woman—Frida Kahlo, born just one year after Motesiczky. Both artists celebrate their dual natures (bohemian and aristocratic for Motesiczky, Mexican and European for Kahlo) while also coming to terms with their own sexuality. Motesiczky never achieves the startling frankness of Kahlo, especially sexually, but few artists ever have. Motesiczky does, however, approach Kahlo’s more surreal moments in works such as The Travelers and The Old Song, but always avoids going all the way in her innate conservatism. Just as Kahlo’s finest art represents the nexus of so many conflicting tensions, Motesiczky’s finest works strike a balance of all the different components of her life. Motesiczky straddles so many worlds—old-world aristocracy and modern bohemia, conservative values and nascent modern feminism, just to name two—that her art provides a wealth of study that has Lloyd’s effort only begins to explore.

The Undiscovered Expressionist: A Life of Marie-Louise von Motesiczky adds another chapter to the ever-evolving story of German Expressionism and makes a significant contribution to the neglected female artists of that period. Female artists today can find a strong role model in Marie-Louise von Motesiczky’s life-long greed for life.


[Many thanks to Yale University Press for providing me with a review copy of The Undiscovered Expressionist: A Life of Marie-Louise von Motesiczky and to the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust, London for permission to use the images shown above.]

Armored Artist

Lovis Corinth, German Impressionist and later Expressionist (although he would have denied either label), was born on July 21, 1858. Corinth’s apparent turn in style coincided with the stroke he suffered in 1911 that rendered his left side partially paralyzed. The Impressionist style he displayed with his natural left handedness soon became tortured Expressionism as he relearned how to draw and paint with his right hand. Corinth painted Samson Blinded (above) in 1912, just a year after his paralysis. The portrait of the debilitated Biblical strongman may be a portrait of Corinth’s own emotional state as he came to grips with the reality that the remarkable draftsmanship of his youth was gone.

Like Kathe Kollwitz, his contemporary in Germany, Corinth experimented with printmaking and could render powerful images in black and white as well as color. His Self Portrait With Armor (above) shows the artist wearing a suit of armor he kept in his studio as a prop. Corinth wore his passionate German nationalistic feelings like a suit of armor as well. He joined the Berlin Secession in 1901 and became its president in 1915, serving until his death in 1925. Upon becoming president, many of the members left the Secession, disagreeing with Corinth’s nationalism and the direction he wished to take the organization. Even in the midst of the horrors of World War I, Corinth continued to stand beside his homeland.

After the stroke in 1925, Corinth discovered an entire new way of using color to express emotion. The pathos of his Ecce Homo (above), painted in 1925, shortly before Corinth’s death, strikes even more penetratingly with the blood red garment of Jesus. The figure on the right wearing the same armor in Corinth’s self portrait above bears a world-weary look on his face, in contrast to the defiance in Corinth’s eyes of the self portrait. Perhaps Ecce Homo hints at some remorse in Corinth at the end, a reevaluation of his nationalism in light of the human cost exacted in its name. Corinth didn’t live to see the rise of Nazi Germany, but his works survived. Despite his faith in the German state and military might, Corinth’s post-stroke works were deemed “degenerate art,” while his pre-stroke works continued to be praised as “truly” German—an odd splitting of this deeply fractured artist.

To Only Connect

“People from the bourgeoisie were entirely without charm for me,” Kathe Kollwitz said in her 1941 memoirs. “On the other hand, the proletariat had great style… I simply found it beautiful. As Zola or someone said, ‘The beautiful is the ugly.’” Kathe Kollwitz found beauty and dignity in the common person suffering and struggling through life and portrayed it with a power and resonance like few others. In Outbreak (above), part of the Peasants’ War series, “Black Anna” leads a charge of peasants against their oppressors. Kollwitz shapes the bodies of the oppressed into an arrowhead striking against tyranny. By showing “Black Anna” from the back, Kollwitz stresses the facelessness of the downtrodden’s struggle, which transcends place and time.



Fellow artist Max Klinger taught Kollwitz early on the power of black and white to convey ideas, free of the noise of color. They shared a faith in the power of graphic art to convey ideas and emotions, such as in her Woman With Dead Child (above). Rejecting the more progressive art styles of the twentieth century, Kollwitz embraced a simple style of powerful draftsmanship, believing that modern art had lost its common touch. “To be sure, Genius can run ahead and seek out new paths,” she wrote in her diary in 1916, “good artists, however, who come after genius—and I count myself among these—have to create again the connection that has been lost.” Kollwitz’s humility downplayed her own special genius to stir emotions and transcend barriers of language and culture. Any parent seeing this image immediately connects with the feeling of losing a child. Peter, Kollwitz’s youngest son and the model for this drawing, died in the opening days of World War I in Flanders.



Peter’s death mobilized Kollwitz’s social consciousness. In images such as The Volunteers (above), which shows death beating the drums of war and leading young men off to die, Kollwitz spoke eloquently of the siren song of war as well as the need for peace. Sadly, Kollwitz’s grandson, also named Peter, volunteered for World War II and died in 1942, repeating the same grim cycle of her own son years before. She struggled under the oppression of the Third Reich and received the label of “degenerate art” despite her great stature in German culture. Kollwitz died in 1945 at the age of 77, a scant eight days before Adolf Hitler found his own “final solution” in his infamous bunker beneath Berlin.


“I am in fact not at all revolutionary, but rather evolutionary,” Kollwitz wrote in her diary in 1920, expressing her wariness of any ideology and her faith in the goodness of the common people. “I am horrified and shaken by all the hatred in the world, I long for the kind of socialism that lets people live, and find that the earth has seen enough of murder, lies, misery, distortion. In short, of all these devilish things. The communist state that builds on that cannot be God’s work.” Kollwitz indeed performed “God’s work” in her art, depicting the oppressed and never the oppressor, raising empathy and compassion to an ideal above all others. The revealing self portraits she left behind, such as the one above, show a face that knows grief and knows how to communicate that knowledge. I’ve always felt that Kollwitz’s work exemplifies the spirit of the Beatitudes like few others: merciful, pure of heart, hungering and thirsting for justice, peacemaker.

Secondary to None

Baccio Bandinelli (1488/1493-1560), The Descent from the Cross, c. 1528/1529; pen and brown ink over black chalk (Private Collection)

The German artist Adolph Menzel lived the motto “Nulla dies sine linea,” or “No day without a line.” The artists featured in the National Gallery of Art’s exhibit Private Treasures: Four Centuries of European Master Drawings prove that those are excellent words to live by.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and The Morgan Library and Museum join together to present this incredible collection of European master drawings collected by a single, anonymous collector in just the last eleven years. As the Director’s forward to the catalogue says, “the quality of her collection bespeaks her profound knowledge and connoisseurship.” Margaret Morgan Grasselli and Andrew Robison of the National Gallery of Art and Rhoda Eitel-Porter and Jennifer Tonkovich of The Morgan Library and Museum not only have assembled a magnificent exhibit but have also written a beautiful and informative catalogue to compliment it.
One of the strengths of the collection is its early Italian drawings from the age of Michelangelo and Da Vinci. Neither of those greats appears here, but this exhibit demonstrates the massive depth and breadth of talent of draftsmanship during the Renaissance like few others. Familiar names such as Fra Bartolommeo, Correggio, Bronzino, Parmigianino, and Sodoma appear, but it is in the resurrection of these names as living, breathing artists that this exhibit excels. Baccio Bandinelli, once the rival of Michelangelo as a sculptor, lives again in the presentation of his boldly drawn, almost Michelangelo-esque Descent From the Cross (above) from 1528/1529. Even Giorgio Vasari, now known mainly for his Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, the first compilation of artist biographies and study of art history and styles, shows off his drafting skills. (As an added treat, one of Vasari’s drawings has notes for his Lives written on the back.)

Federico Barocci (probably 1535-1612), Madonna Reading, with the Christ Child on her Lap; verso, Torso of a Bearded Man, 1568/1580; black and red chalk with pink, light blue, yellow, orange, and brown-red pastel on blue-gray paper; verso, black chalk with pink, red, and brown pastel (Private Collection)

The Madonna Reading, with the Christ Child on her Lap (above), from 1568/1580, demonstrates the pioneering work in pastels by Federico Barocci. Pastels suffered under the misconception of being a lesser medium until the 19th century, but Barocci’s work proves that artists hundreds of years before Degas made that medium their own. Such re-evaluations of media and techniques lay at the heart of this exhibit and any exhibit on drawing, in my mind. Although many drawings are prepatory works for paintings, they should no longer be considered lesser works and should be appreciated for the techniques and talent behind them.


Ferdinand Bol (1616-1680), Christ and the Woman of Samaria, mid-1640s; pen and brown ink with brown and gray-brown wash with corrections in white (Private Collection)

The idea of drawings as primary works unto themselves, rather than servants of a final work, seems to originate with Rembrandt. In Ferdinand Bol’s Christ and the Woman of Samaria (above), from the 1640s, Bol uses the same vibrant lines and bold strokes of his teacher Rembrandt to revisit a familiar biblical scene and infuse it with new life. Rembrandt, who is not represented in the collection, looms over much of the drawing of the 17th century and later, freeing the medium of drawing from second-class status and freeing the hand of the artist from the purely classical lines of the Renaissance to express the emotional strokes of early Romanticism and Modernism.



Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), Moonlit Landscape with Lovers and a Church, 1797/1798; pen and dark brown ink with brown, gray, and blue washes, heightened with white and touched with yellow and pink chalks, over graphite, with border lines by the artist (?) in pen and black ink (Private Collection)

Caspar David Friedrich’s 1797/1798 A Moonlit Landscape With Lovers and a Church (above) heralds this new wave of Romanticism. Andrew Robison’s short essay accompanying this work deftly analyzes the potential symbolism of Friedrich’s tiny work and also places it within the context of his later, grander Romantic landscapes. The works collected from the 19th and 20th centuries represent a turn away from the earlier religious works towards more individualized, humanist subjects. For example, Ingres’ double portrait of himself and his wife offers a glimpse in graphite into the artist’s soul that few other works by him allow.



Adolph Menzel (1815-1905), Seated Man Leaning Forward, 1887; graphite with stumping (Private Collection)

Friedrich’s drawing is only part of the second area of strength of the collection—later German drawings. Adolf Menzel’s Elderly Man Leaning Forward (above) from 1887 is done entirely in graphite, showing how Menzel was able to master that deceptively simple format and construct an almost sculpturally solid portrait full of fascinating textures.

Käthe Kollwitz (1867 - 1945), Grieving Mother, 1903; black chalk and graphite on greenish wove paper (Private Collection)

Käthe Kollwitz’s Grieving Mother (above), related perhaps to her Mother and Dead Son series of 1903, continues the collection’s exploration of German draftsmanship. The exactingly drawn hands of the grieving mother, who may be resting her head on a pillow or her child’s dead body, express the anguish we cannot see in her hidden face. Kollwitz’s portrait of herself at 60 years of age, also in the collection, reveals the weariness and the pride of the artist with an honesty seldom seen outside of the portraits of Rembrandt.

I’m leaving out many of the well-known names also in this exhibit (Degas, Constable, Gainsborough, Delacroix, Fragonard, and Redon, to name a few) because the true stars of this collection are the medium of drawing and the vision of this single, anonymous collector. Such exhibits of the lost masters of the past as well as the forgotten aspects of better-known genius should go a long way in establishing the field of drawing and works on paper as second to none.

[Many thanks to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, for providing me with a review copy of the catalogue to Private Treasures: Four Centuries of European Master Drawings and the images from the exhibit.]