Skip to content

Käthe Kollwitz Quotes

1867–1945 Germany

Käthe Schmidt Kollwitz (July 8, 1867 – April 22, 1945) was a German painter, printmaker, and sculptor whose work offered an eloquent and often searing account of the human condition in the first half of the 20th century. Her empathy for the less fortunate, expressed most famously through the graphic means of drawing, etching, lithography, and woodcut, embraced the victims of poverty, hunger and war.

Germany
Painters

Also known as: Kathe Kollwitz, Kollwitz, Käthe

Random Käthe Kollwitz quote

12 quotes

I am gradually approaching the period in my life when work comes first.

The Diary and Letters of Käthe Kollwitz (1955)

Pacifism simply is not a matter of calm looking on; it is hard work.

The Diary and Letters of Käthe Kollwitz (1955)

For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.

The Diary and Letters of Käthe Kollwitz (1955)

There must be understanding between the artist and the people.

The Diary and Letters of Käthe Kollwitz (1955)

I have been through a revolution, and I am convinced that I am no revolutionist.

The Diary and Letters of Käthe Kollwitz (1955)

I felt that I have no right to withdraw from the responsibility of being an advocate. It is my duty to voice the sufferings of people, the sufferings that never end and are as big as mountains.

The Diary and Letters of Käthe Kollwitz (1955)

For work, one must be hard and thrust outside of oneself what one has lived through.

I thought I was a revolutionary and was only an evolutionary.

The Diary and Letters of Käthe Kollwitz (1955)

Every war already carries within it the war that will answer it. Every war is answered by a new war, until everything is smashed. That is why I am so wholeheartedly for a radical end to this madness and why my only hope is in world socialism.

The Diary and Letters of Käthe Kollwitz (1955)

For me the Koenigsberg longshoremen had beauty; the Polish jimkes on their grain ships had beauty; the broad freedom of movement in the gestures of the common people had beauty. Middle-class people held no appeal for me at all. Bourgeois life on the whole seemed to me pedantic.

The Diary and Letters of Käthe Kollwitz (1955)

My work is not, of course, pure art in the sense that Schmidt-Rottluff's is, but it is art nonetheless... It is all right with me that my work serves a purpose. I want to have an effect on my time, in which human beings are so confused and in need of help.

The working-class woman shows me much more than the ladies who are totally limited by conventional behavior. The working-class woman shows me her hands, her feet, and her hair. She lets me see the shape and form of her body through her clothes. She presents herself and the expression of her feelings openly, without disguises.

Käthe Kollwitz: Woman and Artist (1976)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Käthe Kollwitz (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.