Storming the Gate - Attack, sheet 5 of the
cycle »A Weavers’ Revolt« & The Sacrifice, sheet 1 of
the series »War«, 1922
“[K]nowledge
of the German artist Käthe
Kollwitz in china owes a great deal to the writer and essayist Lu Xun. His internationalist
version inspired him to spread in his county the works of the engravers from
Germany”
In this discovery art started to learn to break the
established norm seen in Chinese printmaking, Kollwitz’s work gave them a look
at the expressive marks depicting the realities of the lives as seen by
mothers, lower class workers, and herself; of which was part of the art being
seen in the art coming out of Germany. The series which inspired these artists
the most were “A Weavers’ Revolt” and
“War”. From these series/cycles they
were inspired by the expressions of the revolting crowd and her focus on the community’s
pain. Images from “A Weavers’ Revolt”
inspired early wood engravings that were produced during the 1930s in Shanghai about
agricultural workers, which resonates with the work. “…[T]he portrayal of an oppressed
crowd forming one single body—galvanized by a feminine presence appearing to
orchestrate and accompany the advance through a wave movement—caught the
imagination of the advocates of engraving in China.”
“In
September 1931, at the end of the meeting of a group of young left-wing
activists, five of them – including the writer Rou Shi -- were arrested and
summarily executed. To pay tribute to their deaths, Lu Xun printed Das Opfer (The Sacrifice) by Kollwitz in the review
Beidao (the big bear), run by Ding Li T.” In doing this he too was calling
forth the unjust actions taken towards men who wanted a change for the people;
and stated the separation of the mother from her child’s similarity to that of
men enlisting to serve in the war was like that of the loss of those men’s
lives for the cause. Lu Xun also used this piece to talk about her work
depicting the death of Karl Liebknecht (whose views were also circulating in
Shanghai). The views of Kollwitz and Liebknecht conflicted with that of the
Chinese government, aligning with the citizens of China like they did in
Germany, and in the end it too resulted in the creation of work on social criticism.
Piotrowski,
Piotr, Art Beyond Borders Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe. Pascal
Dubourg Glatigny, and Jerôme Bazin. (1945-1989) Budapest, New
York: Central European University Press, 2016.
Second Image: https://www.kollwitz.de/en/series-war-overview
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