A Weavers' Revolt

Death, sheet 2 of the cycle »A Weavers’ Revolt«, 1893-1897 & Storming the Gate - Attack, sheet 5 of the cycle »A Weavers’ Revolt«, 1893-1897

“However much we feel we know the war; it is a superimposition of interpretations built up over time. Sometimes it is enough to recognize this and work with it but sometimes we need to look beneath, and quite simply, start afresh” - Gail Braybon

A Weavers' Revolt cycle depicts the idea of the original story “modernized” to fit the politics of the current social issues as seen in her lifetime. It does so by depicting a series of fictional scenes of citizen worker’s lives before, during and after taking a stand for improved working conditions. In wanting to influence individuals to take a stand for rights of lower class individuals in the work place, “Kollwitz compressed a wealth of associations into simple motifs. [. . .] Everything is expression, gesture and iconic form.” (*) There’s a softness to some of the Images, especially in the ones involving character death which says something about Kollwitz first inclinations of death as a somber experience, which changes after the death of her son Peter. This is not to say either depiction is wrong, more so it implies the insertion of a personal aspect to her work after experiencing such a gut-wrenching personal loss.

The images have a heavy mood due to her mark-making process in combination to her choice of materials. “For the cycle she chose the hard, practically grain less pear wood, working over several months at achieving a coherence of line, images, form, and shape in order to communicate with her audience as directly and clearly as possible. “ (*) Even with the fine detail found in the images we are still able to see aspects of her later work in these early images. The expressive and hard marks seen in the sky within the second image, as well as the detail found in the man at the lower left corner’s pants are examples of this. The mood in her work has always been there, that of progressive criticism emphasized by the darkness of the figures as seen in the first image. Death is a constant theme within Kollwitz work, of which we will take into the next post.

(*) Ingrid Sharp. "Kääthe Kollwitz's Witness to War: Gender, Authority, and Reception." Women in German Yearbook 27 (2011): 87-107.       

Both images are from: https://www.kollwitz.de/en/cycle-weavers-revolt-overview