The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Neue Galerie, an institution dedicated to German and Austrian art also in New York, jointly acquired a rare self-portrait by 20th-century German printmaker Käthe Kollwitz.
lithography Self-portrait on his face (1904), depicts the 37-year-old artist. Her face is presented in various neutral tones. Museums were able to purchase the piece with funds from multiple donors, including ARTnews Top 200 Collectors by Joe Carroll and Ronald S. Lauder, longtime MoMA trustee and one of the founders of Neue Galerie.
Born in 1867 in the Prussian city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia), Kollwitz is widely known for her subject matter that focused on the inner lives of women. Active in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, it gained fame among its male counterparts who participated in German Expressionist circles. Throughout her work, she focused on depicting themes of grief, poverty, war, and the working class.
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The current work will join 34 other publications by the artist in the MoMA collection. Face selfie It is one of the few works that Kollwitz created in color; After 1905, she moved to a colorless, black-and-white painting.
The news comes as museums around the world move to fill historical gaps in their permanent collections, primarily by acquiring the works of women and artists of color, whose contributions to art history have long been overlooked and underrepresented in institutional collections.
A statement from the museum confirmed that the Museum of Modern Art is planning a major exhibition dedicated to Kollwitz’s work in the near future. A large-scale artist focused on the exhibition opened at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 2019.
Christoph Scherkes, Senior Curator of the Graphics and Prints Department at the Museum of Modern Art, described the print as “a monument in the history of the printing industry and a work that speaks as much about its time as our own,” adding: “Käthe Kollwitz’s legacy looms large throughout the 20th and 21st centuries” .
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