About the work

The seventh and final work in Kolwitz’s Peasant’s War series. A powerful work showing the despair of revolutionaries and peasants corralled, many suffering but many still defiant.

Kollwitz was inspired in the Peasant’s War series by Wilhelm Zimmermann’s General History of the Great Peasant War. The mid-16th Century uprising across Central Europe was Europe’s largest popular uprising until the French Revolution 250 years later. With the slaughter of as many as one-third of the 300,000 uprising peasants, the revolt was an utter failure, but it has more recently been seen as a landmark event in the struggle for economic freedom. Kollwitz’s series of etchings was published in 1908 by the Association of Historical Art.

This copy is State VIII b, a posthumous print by the art dealer and publisher Alexander von der Becke. In 1931 von der Becke founded a publishing business when he took over the inventory of Käthe Kollwitz’s unsold prints and her printing plates from Galerie Emil Richter in Dresden. Richter had published Kollwitz’s prints from about 1910 to 1930, when it became bankrupted.

Unsurprisingly, Kollwitz was not popular during the Nazi regime and von der Becke’s business was by the Gestapo in 1941. The business was reestablished in 1946, after which it resumed the reproduction of Kollwitz prints from the thirty etching plates that survived the war.

This work is unframed but can be framed to museum standards for about $250 (dependent on your frame choices). Please contact Washington Color for more information about framing.