The Weaver's Rebellion- by Kathe Kollwitz

  Kathe Kollwitz, a German artist worked with painting, printmaking and sculpture.. her name conjures up powerful images of mothers and children, of solidarity among human beings and of protest against social injustice and suffering. Her works achieved a brilliant balance between subject and form. She was influenced by Max Klinger who encouraged her to practice print making. Drawing, as Klinger defined it, had more in common with poetry in its potential for the expression for ideas; less complete and concrete in details than painting. Unlike Klinger and other famous contemporaries of 1890s, Kollwitz was not a painter-printmaker, but exclusively the latter. In the early years of her works, the proletariat laid claim to her imagination through literary sources. Direct contact with them only came later when she moved with her husband to Berlin. In early years, during her studies, Kollwitz chose to create a visual narrative based on Emile Zola's novel Germinal. During the time she was working with the scene from Germinal, Kollwitz attended a performance of Gerhart Hauptmann's play The Weavers, which was based upon a historical uprising of Silesian Workers. ' The Weavers' made an enormous impact when it was produced. Kollwitz was so moved by the performance that she abandoned Zola's novel as the subject of her graphic series and substituted it with Hauptmann's play. Thus the series 'A Weaver's Rebellion' appeared in 1898.The series consisted of six images: Poverty, Death, Council, March of Weavers, Storming the Gate and End. In the last part of the series i.e. 'End', a standing women clenches her fists, with this rhetorical gesture, Kollwitz reformulated the message of the play- from resignation to militant anger.... 

Poverty

 Death

 Council

 March of the Weavers

                                                              Storming the Gate

                                                                               End

Kollwitz depiction of the poor did not originated entirely from sympathy or her conviction to provide them with a voice through her art. Kollwitz simply considered the proletariat life as beautiful.....

Kollwitz admitted this in her memoirs from 1941: 

 "Occasionally my parents themselves said to me, "There are also cheery things in life. Why do you only show the dark side?" That I could not answer. It held no charm for me. Originally pity and sympathy were only minor elements leading me to representation of proletarian life; rather, I simply found it beautiful. As Zola or someone said,"The beautiful is the ugly."....."