LECTURE
on November 14, 2024
at 19.00
Entrance 5,00 euros | reduced 3,00 euros
The reception of Käthe Kollwitz in Asia
The work of Käthe Kollwitz is also highly regarded outside Europe. In Asia, the unmistakable language of her graphic works left a lasting impression.
The artist herself harboured a great desire to travel to India together with her husband Karl Kollwitz, as evidenced by several diary entries such as the following one from August 1925. However, for reasons unknown to us, they did not embark on the journey and the country remained merely a place of longing for the artist.
“The idea of India is already firmly in my mind, even with Karl. (…) It’s possible that India will revitalise me so much that I’ll be much fresher for work afterwards – it’s possible I’ll catch malaria and won’t be able to do anything afterwards.”
We do not know where Käthe Kollwitz’ longing for India came from. She could possibly have met the famous Indian poet, philosopher and painter Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), who was in Berlin from 11 to 17 July 1930. His watercolours and drawings were shown in a solo exhibition at the Ferdinand Möller Gallery in Berlin-Schöneberg. Afterwards, Tagore donated selected paintings to the National Gallery, as he noted in a letter to the director Ludwig Justi. On 14 July 1930, he visited the world-famous physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955) at his summer house in Caputh, a small suburb of Potsdam. Here, too, an encounter with Käthe Kollwitz could not be ruled out, as there is evidence of at least one stay at Einstein’s summer house. The artist was often in Caputh because Max Immanuel, a friend of her son Hans, owned a summer house there, which she and her family liked to visit.
Lu Xun (1881-1936), China’s most important writer of the 20th century, acquired works by Käthe Kollwitz with the help of the American journalist Agnes Smedley (1892-1950). In the 1930s, he published numerous works by the artist and helped her name to achieve great renown in China. Agnes Smedley, who had campaigned for the Indian independence movement against England from 1918, had already published an extensive article on Käthe Kollwitz and her important work entitled Germany’s Artist of Social Misery in August 1925 in the important Indian magazine Modern Review, which was published in Calcutta at the time.
The topic of Kollwitz and Asia is so diverse that Southeast Asia expert Werner Kraus focused entirely on the artist’s impact in China in his lecture on March 14, 2024. Following from this, his second lecture on November 14, 2024, is now dedicated to Käthe Kollwitz’ presence in Pakistan, India and Indonesia, as the newspaper clipping from the Sumatra Post of 1937 shown here exemplifies.
Dr. Werner Kraus studied Southeast Asian Studies at the South Asia Institute of the University of Heidelberg and at the Modern Indonesia Project of Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. In 1984, he co-founded the Chair of Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Passau. Kraus is currently director of the Centre for Southeast Asian Art, a private research and documentation center.
The collection presentation can be visited until the start of the lecture at 7 pm.
Illustration of the ‘Klein Zelfportret’ (Small Self-Portrait, 1920) in the Sumatra Post, 10-16 September 1937