Käthe Kollwitz (Germany, 1867–1945), Death Grasps at a Group of Children, 1934, lithograp, Cincinnati Art Museum, Gift of Robert and Elaine Blatt, 1985.12.

Audio Description

This lithograph, titled Death Grasps at a Group of Children, was made in 1934 by German artist Käthe Kollwitz, who lived from 1867 to 1945. It was given to the Cincinnati Art Museum by Robert and Elaine Blatt. Its inventory number is 1985.12.

We are presented with a vertical print, two feet high, showing the personification of Death claiming two young children, rendered in blacks and greys. The skeletal figure stands with legs spread wide, leaning over, so the top of its head and long arms are most visible. Death is clad only in a cloak that blows straight up in the air, creating a menacing black triangular form at the top that extends beyond the edges of the composition. Two children cower in the foreground, while Death’s spindly arms and large hands grasp at them. One is huddled in fright and the other appears to swoon while wrapping his or her arms around Death’s left forearm. In the background on the left, a third child runs in the opposite direction, out of the composition.

Label Copy

This lithograph, titled Death Grasps at a Group of Children, was made in 1934 by German artist Käthe Kollwitz, who lived from 1867 to 1945. It was given to the Cincinnati Art Museum by Robert and Elaine Blatt. Its inventory number is 1985.12.

Käthe Kollwitz trained in Munich and Berlin in the late 1880s and early 1890s and became well known for art that advocated for the peasantry and working class. Through a masterful command of her media, whether drawing, printmaking or sculpture, Kollwitz communicated powerful emotions and themes, such as grief, desperation, war, and death. This work is one of a suite of eight lithographs, each depicting a different encounter with death. In this print, a skeletal figure grips two terrified children as a third child attempts to flee.

Like her friend Ernst Barlach, Kollwitz was expelled from the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1933. The political and social themes of her work drew Nazi censure and she was prohibited from exhibiting. Her work was included in the 1937 Munich "Degenerate Art" exhibition. Kollwitz fled Berlin in 1943; the works she left behind were lost when her house was destroyed later that year.

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