ANTI-WAR RARE PRINT TO SELL AT BONHAMS

Thursday, 18 October 2007 01:48

London - “Never Again War”, a rare print by celebrated artist Käthe Kollwitz depicting one of the most powerful and resonant images from pacifist movements in Germany between the two World Wars will sell at Bonhams on 12 November 2007. The lithograph will feature in the Old Master, Modern and Contemporary Print sale in New Bond Street, London.

Käthe Kollwitz (1867 – 1945) was one of the most important German artists of the 20th century. She worked as a painter, printmaker and sculptor, and expressed her deep concern for social issues through heart-rending images of people touched by poverty, war and death.

Following the death of her youngest son, who was killed in action in 1914, she became committed to the pacifist cause and produced a series of anti-war posters. “Nie Wieder Krieg” (Never Again War) was commissioned by the Socialist Democratic Party in 1924 for a German Youth Conference and it became an iconic image used to unite the pacifist movement.

Kollwitz printed three different states of the lithograph showing a shouting figure with one arm raised as a defiant gesture. It was the final version including the hand-written words “Nie Wieder Krieg” which was used as a poster. Bonhams will be selling a much rarer copy of the second state, which shows the figure alone without the words.

Recognised early in her life as one of Germany's most prominent graphic artists, Kollwitz was appointed as the first female professor and member of the Prussian Academy of Fine Arts in 1919. The political stance of her work brought her to the attention of the Nationalist Socialist Party and she was forced to resign from the Academy in 1933. She was later threatened with deportation to a concentration camp for giving an interview to a Soviet newspaper. In 1942, aged 75, her grandson was killed in action, and the following year her home was bombed. She died in 1945 shortly before the signing of the armistice. The events of her life fuelled the emotional power of her work in which she strove to highlight and protest against injustice.

Richard Slocombe, curator of ‘Weapons of Mass Communication’ the current exhibition of war posters at the Imperial War Museum said: “Käthe Kollwitz has often been linked to the German Expressionist movement of the early twentieth century, yet her art has always sat uncomfortably alongside the dissolute and self-destructive romanticism of say Kirchner, Pechstein or Beckmann. Hers was an art born from personal loss and reflective of the human tragedy of war."

This exhibition, charting the poster's evolution as a tool of protest and counter-culture, runs from 4 October 2007 to 30 March 2008 at the Imperial War Museum, Lambeth Road, London SE1. Visit : www.bonhams.com