ARTISTS
Coe, Sue
Kollwitz, Käthe
ESSAY
All good art is political! There is none that
isn’t. And the ones that try hard not to be political are political by
saying, “We love the status quo.”... I’m not interested in art that is
not in the world. —Toni Morrison
Prior to the
twentieth century, art’s political grounding was taken for granted. Most
European art—religious scenes, portraits and history painting—affirmed
the values and legitimacy of the ruling class. As hereditary monarchs
came under fire, first in the French Revolution and then in the more
widespread but short-lived revolts of 1848, artists gradually lost their
aristocratic support base. Painters like David, Ingres and Delacroix
embraced the new order, helping shape the myth of modern France as a
land of liberty, fraternity and equality. Others assumed a more critical
stance. Daumier, whose caricatures at one point landed him in prison,
lobbied for greater social justice. Goya, though employed by the Spanish
court, created the satirical etching cycle
Caprichos and, in response to Napoléon’s aggressive imperialism, the scathing
Disasters of War.
Egalitarian idealism, coupled with growing social unrest, prompted
artists more frequently to depict peasants and workers. Art remained
rooted in political realities, but the emphasis shifted.
A
significant number of artists identified with the forces of reform. The
descriptor “avant-garde,” first applied to artists in 1825 by the
socialist thinker Olinde Rodrigues, originally had political
connotations. Artists, Rodrigues thought, were natural leaders in the
struggle to remake society. The modernist stylistic upheavals that swept
through Europe at the turn of the last century were not about “art for
art’s sake.” Artists were looking for new forms that would give
expression to the radically new circumstances of modern life. They
wanted to sweep away the stale pictorial and moral conventions of the
entrenched bourgeoisie. That modernism could indeed be perceived as a
political threat was later affirmed by its suppression under Hitler and
Stalin.
Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) grew up in a family of
committed Christian dissidents. Her maternal grandfather, Julius Rupp,
was the pastor of an underground Protestant congregation, the Free
Society of Königsberg. Hounded by the police, fined and jailed, Rupp
taught the future artist to value freedom of conscience over obeisance
to the state. Though Kollwitz was not especially religious, she believed
in duty, sacrifice and service to a higher cause. She viewed socialism
as a secular path to “God’s kingdom on earth”—imagined by her
grandfather as a classless society with equality and justice for all.
Karl and Konrad Schmidt, the artist’s father and brother, were among the
founding members of the German Social Democratic Party.
The
German socialists supported women’s rights, and therefore Karl Schmidt
encouraged his daughter’s professional aspirations. He dreamed she might
become an acclaimed history painter. But such an achievement—then the
pinnacle of artistic success—was unattainable for a woman. Prohibited
from enrolling at the Academy, females were shunted into the lesser
areas of creative endeavor—crafts, printmaking, at most landscape or
portrait painting. Fearful of competition, men not only restricted
women’s career options, but issued lengthy prescriptive pronouncements
about the nature of femininity. Women, they opined, lacked the
intellect, objectivity and spiritual understanding required to create
anything of note; females could best serve the arts as muses. It was
perhaps with these ideas in mind that Kollwitz later ascribed her
professional persistence to the “masculine” aspects of her character.
Propelled
by personal preference as well as the available educational
opportunities, Kollwitz made her way, through a succession of women’s
art schools and private lessons, to printmaking. It was a fortuitous
choice, because history painting in the grand tradition was waning,
along with the aristocracy. History as a subject, however, could better
be depicted in a sequence of prints than in a single painted image.
Inspired by the print cycles of Max Klinger, Kollwitz’s first foray in
this realm was
Revolt of the Weavers, a series of three
lithographs and three etchings loosely based on Gerhart Hauptmann’s play
about the 1844 Silesian weavers’ rebellion. The
Weavers prints
(1893-97) evidenced a mastery of craft and nuance heretofore seen only
in academic history painting: the orchestration of complex figural
groupings and subtle chiaroscuro effects in a variety of evocative
pictorial spaces to convey a compelling dramatic narrative. Kollwitz’s
intensive engagement with the expressive capabilities of printmaking
techniques parallels, and to some extent precedes, the work of
modernists such as Edvard Munch and the German
Brücke artists,
but Kollwitz’s prints were revolutionary less in form than in content.
And while for male modernists printmaking was always secondary to work
in other, more “important” mediums, for Kollwitz it remained primary.
Revolt of the Weavers and Kollwitz’s next, similarly themed print cycle,
Peasant War
(1902-08), treated both genders as comrades in arms. This was in
keeping with the tenets of German socialist feminism, which held that
proletarian men and women were united under the yoke of capitalism and
would be liberated together when that yoke was lifted. However, through
exposure to the working-class patients of her husband Karl Kollwitz, a
physician, the artist began to recognize that proletarian women had
unique problems stemming from their subordination to and dependency on
proletarian men. “As soon as the man drinks or gets sick or loses his
job, the same thing always happens,” Kollwitz observed. “Either he hangs
like a dead weight on his family and lets them support him...or he
becomes depressed... or crazy... or he kills himself.”
Kollwitz
grew increasingly concerned with women’s issues such as inadequate
wages, temperance, domestic violence and lack of access to contraception
or abortion. After completing the
Peasant War series, she took
her subjects from lived experience rather than history, and motherhood
came to assume a central role in her work. The mother’s instinctual
drive to save her children from harm was rendered with an evocative
realism that encouraged viewers to empathize with the woman’s plight. At
the same time, the images were a symbolic call to action, an invocation
to fashion a world that would be safe for future generations.
Like
many progressive Europeans on both sides of the conflict, Kollwitz
initially imagined that World War I would wipe away the stale remnants
of bourgeois materialism and lead to a renewal of human society. Steeled
by a deeply ingrained sense of duty, she was even prepared to sacrifice
her teenaged son, Peter, for the greater good. She grudgingly granted
him permission to volunteer, and was devastated when he fell on the
Belgian front scarcely two months later. It was hard for the artist to
accept that her boy had died for nothing. She only gradually grew to
understand not just that this particular war was pointless, but that all
wars hobble humanity by eviscerating the rising generation.
“Seed-corn,” Kollwitz declared (quoting Goethe), “must not be ground.”
World
War I transformed Kollwitz into a committed pacifist. Unlike Otto Dix
and George Grosz, whose depictions of the war were conditioned by their
army experiences, her
War cycle (1921-22) emphasized the home front. In the first plate,
The Sacrifice (Das Opfer), a mother holds her infant aloft, as though offering him to the gods. But the German word
Opfer also means “victim,” and it is clear that the artist’s interpretation is elegiac rather than heroic. Another plate,
The Volunteers,
shows a surge of youth heedlessly following the drumbeat of death,
Peter’s face recognizable at the forefront. In a 1923 antiwar poster
commissioned by the International Federation of Trade Unions and
distributed in fourteen languages, Kollwitz focused on the “survivors,”
whom she described as “women huddled together in a black lump,
protecting their children just as animals do with their own brood.” In
1924, on the tenth anniversary of World War I, she created the iconic
poster
Never Again War!
No longer the naïve
revolutionary who once dreamed of joining her father and brother on the
barricades, Kollwitz found it impossible to take sides in the political
conflicts that roiled the Weimar Republic. The Social Democrats were too
susceptible to rightwing pressure, the Communists too prone to
violence. Nevertheless, Peter’s death had redoubled her desire to serve
humankind in the broadest sense. She was quick to lend her art in
support of any cause that moved her: the food shortages that swept
through Germany, Austria and Russia after the war, the plight of
prisoners, the poor and, as always, the extra burden shouldered by women
and children. Her aim was to “bear witness,” to “express...the
suffering of human beings.” “My art serves a purpose,” Kollwitz
continued. “I want to exert an influence in my own time, in which human
beings are so helpless and destitute.”
Kollwitz’s
rejection of any fixed ideology did not keep her work from being
appropriated for unintended political ends. Even the Nazis, who quickly
eliminated all the artist’s professional outlets, found a use for one of
her lithographs,
Bread! Though Kollwitz was never a Communist,
the East Germans made her their own after World War II. In the West,
which sought to whitewash the reality of Nazi collusion, she was offered
up as the prototypical “good German.” The evident ease with which
socially engaged art could be misappropriated for propaganda purposes
prompted many artists to back away from politics in the second half of
the twentieth century.
During the Cold War, U.S. cultural
policy willfully discredited any sort of political art. Figurative work
was dismissed based on its superficial resemblance to Soviet Socialist
Realism. The history of prewar European modernism was rewritten to
downplay the artists’ humanistic motivations and oftentimes socialist
leanings. The critic Clement Greenberg seconded and advanced Alfred
Barr’s formalist approach, which drove the agenda at the Museum of
Modern Art. The goal, Greenberg decreed, was to create a work of art xso
vacuous that it could not “be reduced in whole or in part to anything
not itself.” Lauded for its lack of apparent content, Abstract
Expressionism was used by the American government to galvanize
intellectual opposition to Communism and to promote the ideal of
democratic freedom abroad.
As the Cold War example
demonstrates, it is remarkably difficult to disentangle even ostensibly
apolitical art from the dominant power structure. The art world’s
attempt to distance itself from the real world in the mistaken belief
that this will keep the work “pure” does not solve the problem of
misappropriation. Yet artists today remain torn between a desire to
address pressing social concerns such as racism, income inequality and
climate change, and the arcane visual language favored by the art world.
“There’s... too much inbred art about itself or otherwise so
specialized that it takes reams of explaining in almost unreadable texts
just to say why it’s relevant at all,” the critic Jerry Saltz wrote in a
recent jeremiad. “And the things that might feel relevant, or radical,
in another context often get so buffered and wrapped in the wealth of
the system...that they cease to offer anything new-seeming.” Genuine
political engagement is still fundamentally at odds with contemporary
art-world practice.
Sue Coe (b. 1951) is not of the art
world. As a girl, she assumed she would become a factory worker, like
her mother, or a secretary. Art was her escape, at first emotionally and
then literally, from a working-class fate. When she was seventeen, Coe
got a scholarship to attend the Chelsea School of Art in London, where
she trained to be an illustrator. “I knew I had to make a living at art.
No one was going to support me except myself,” she recalls.
“[Illustration] was one of the few career paths that was open to women:
children’s books, or greeting card illustrations, or a job making
wallpaper designs (flowers are ‘female’).” In 1972 Coe moved to New York
and began doing editorial illustration for
The New York Times
and similar publications. Designing for the printed page taught the
artist to refine her visual messaging. “If the images are not an
effective lure,” she explains, “immediately compelling or accessible,
the viewer will not consider reading the content.” While then unfamiliar
with Klinger’s treatise
Painting and Drawing, Coe, like Kollwitz, instinctively understood that black-and-white is better suited to social criticism than color.
Coe
had developed the first shreds of a political consciousness protesting
the Vietnam War as a student in London. “I could see this was a moral
stand,” she remembers, “even though at the time I didn’t know Karl from
Groucho.” In New York, she joined the Arts Club, a place where aging
Marxists, many of them survivors of the Great Depression and the
McCarthy-era blacklist, met to discuss politics and print posters in
support of local issues like tenants’ rights. She also broadened her
aesthetic horizons, discovering the work of Daumier, Dix, Goya, Grosz
and, of course, Kollwitz. Free of formalist dogma and its concomitant
prescriptions, which still gripped American academia, Coe selected from
the broad panoply of art history those influences that spoke to her.
Tired of the constraints imposed by her editors, she also began choosing
her own subjects and working on a larger scale.
Coe made
her reputation as an artist in the mid 1980s with canvases based on
headline events, including the notorious pool-table rape of a New
Bedford woman (now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art) and
the “subway vigilante,” Bernard Goetz. However (again like Kollwitz),
she preferred to work in series that facilitated a more in-depth
exploration. “My preference,” she says, “is to choose a topic, or have
it choose me, and research it and do it well over a decade.” Coe’s
approach is journalistic, and she likes to see her images accompanied by
factual reportage, preferably in book form. In 1983, she published her
first book, with text by Holly Metz,
How to Commit Suicide in South Africa. This and her next book,
X (The Life and Times of Malcolm X)
(1986), explored the relationship between racial prejudice and
genocide. More generally, Coe’s work has been an indictment of the ways
in which capitalism subjugates the weak, dividing society into classes
of oppressors and victims. Writing in the catalogue of her 1987-89
traveling retrospective,
Police State, the art historian Donald
Kuspit credited the artist with creating “a new genre, somewhere between
political cartoon and history painting.”
Essentially, Sue
Coe picked up where Kollwitz left off. Coe views herself as “a witness”
who uses art “to help serve justice and highlight the oppression that
is concealed.” Even in our media-saturated environment, there are
incidents—such as police shootings or the so-called suicides of jailed
anti-apartheid activists—that can only be recreated after the fact, and
locations—such as slaughterhouses—where cameras are not allowed. There
are also a great many horrific places—such as prisons, AIDS wards and
sweatshops—that we know exist but prefer to ignore. Coe’s job is to go
there, observe and record. “People think they can choose to be
indifferent,” she explains, “and the filter of art is a useful veil to
present the reality. It opens up a chance to have a dialogue where the
viewer asks questions and is more open to the challenge of change.”
For
Coe, the predations of capitalism transcend the specifics of identity
politics, uniting all socioeconomic minorities in common oppression.
Growing up near a slaughterhouse on the outskirts of London, she came to
view non-human animals as part of an overriding continuum of corporate
violence. “We need economic, gender
and species equality,” she
declares. Today the sort of widespread hunger depicted by Kollwitz is
rarely seen in developed nations. Instead, we suffer from the problems
of overproduction, which are subtler and more globally diffuse:
malnutrition, the destruction of indigenous crops, deforestation and
sweeping environmental degradation. Agribusiness and the meat industry
are behind many of these calamities, Coe points out. “Animal agriculture
is among the leading causes of climate change,” she says. “Animals as a
class of beings are facing extinction.” Coe sees farmed animals as
analogous to the children in Kollwitz’s work: innocent creatures trod
under by the malevolence of an unjust system; creatures that stand both
for themselves and for the future, in that their persecution reflects
existential environmental concerns.
From the outset, Coe’s art has been predicated on the belief that, “if people know the facts, they’ll change the system.”
How to Commit Suicide in South Africa
was widely used as an organizing tool on college campuses, supporting
the disinvestment movement that ultimately contributed to the end of
apartheid. Since Coe began focusing on animal rights in the late 1980s,
people have become much more aware of issues first highlighted in her
work: the immense cruelty of factory farming; the meat industry’s
disproportionate consumption of natural resources; the concomitant
pollution and degradation of our food supply. In fact, these
consciousness-raising efforts have proved so successful that Coe worries
animal welfare will come to overshadow animal rights. She does not
merely want to improve conditions for food animals, but to end meat
consumption altogether. She sees her work as empowering viewers with a
simple message: go vegan. “Changing what we eat is one way to do
something positive for the environment and to help other people,” Coe
says. “We can control what we put into our mouths, what we put into our
bodies, and with this starting point, who knows what is possible?”
Käthe
Kollwitz and Sue Coe are outliers in the context of an art world that,
even in its more rebellious moments, has tended to serve the interests
of the powerful. Both artists found niches in genres— printmaking and
illustration—that connect directly with the general public but are not
heavily contested by men. And as women, each intuitively understood the
far-ranging effects of discrimination and oppres- sion. “Women are
closer to the heel of the boot,” Coe observes. “They are forced into the
roles of being the caretaker, the peacemaker, and as such are the last
line of defense for the most vulnerable.”
Rooted in the
real world, the art of Käthe Kollwitz and Sue Coe communicates with
people in a visual language they understand. Though their styles are
very different, both artists combine immediately recognizable
representational elements with an expressive abbreviation of form that
directly engages the emotions. Kollwitz sometimes spent years refining a
single image, trying out variations until she found the most effective
synthesis of content and form. “It’s always been a balance of form and
content, throughout the history of art,” Coe notes. “The work must
achieve a level of technique to convince the viewer to look at the
sincerity of the content.” “Admittedly, my art is not ‘pure’ art,”
Kollwitz declared. “But art nonetheless.” One-hundred-and-fifty years
after the older artist’s birth, the magnitude of her accomplishment
still resonates, not just with followers like Coe, but with those of us
who know we have yet to achieve equality and justice for all.
We
would like to express our deepest gratitude to Sibylle von Heydebrand
and Daniel Stoll for lending so many of their Kollwitz treasures to our
exhibition. This show would not have been possible without their
cooperation. The Galerie St. Etienne’s exhibition coordinator, Fay
Beilis Duftler, also provided invaluable contributions to the project.
Copies of Sue Coe’s latest book (her seventh),
The Animals’ Vegan Manifesto,
(122 pages, 115 black & white illustrations, soft-cover) may be
purchased for $17.00, plus $10.00 shipping and handling. New York
residents, please add sales tax. Checklist entries are accompanied by
their catalogue raisonné numbers, where applicable. Image dimensions are
given for prints, full dimensions for all other works.
