The Barr Award is given annually “to the author or authors of an especially distinguished catalogue in the history of art, published in the English language under the auspices of a museum, library, or collection.” This year two catalogues were recognized: Marchesano’s Käthe Kollwitz and Katherine A. Bussard and Kristen Gresh’s “Life” Magazine and the Power of Photography, published by the Princeton University Art Museum.
German printmaker Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) is known for her unapologetic social and political imagery; her representations of grief, suffering, and struggle; and her equivocal ideas about artistic and political labels. Käthe Kollwitz: Prints, Process, Politics explores Kollwitz’s printmaking experiments and the evolution of her images, and assesses the unusually rich progressions of preparatory drawings, proofs, and rejected images behind Kollwitz’s compositions of struggling workers, rebellious peasants, and grieving mothers.
This selected catalogue of the Dr. Richard A. Simms collection at the GRI provides a bird’s-eye view of Kollwitz’s sequences of images as well as the interrelationships among prints produced over multiple years. The meanings and sentiments emerging from Kollwitz’s images are not, as is often implied, unmediated expressions of her politics and emotions. Rather, Kollwitz transformed images with deliberate technical and formal experiments, seemingly endless adjustments, wholesale rejections, and strategic regroupings of figures and forms—all of which demonstrate that her dedication to making art was never a straightforward means to political or emotional ends. This volume was published to accompany the exhibition Käthe Kollwitz: Prints, Process, Politics, which was on view at the Getty Research Institute at the Getty Center from December 3, 2019, to mid-March 2020. The exhibition was due to travel to the Art Institute of Chicago but was cancelled due to COVID-19 closures.
Author Louis Marchesano, former curator of prints and drawings at the GRI, now the Audrey and William H. Helfand Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, notes, “The kinds of questions my collaborators and I addressed grew directly out of the extraordinary collection of Dr. Richard A. Simms, with whom I spent countless hours discussing Kollwitz’s work. The book, which I worked on with Jay A. Clarke and Natascha Kirchner, is in a way an extension of those conversations, and the receipt of the Barr Award is a tribute to Richard himself.” Mary E. Miller, director of the GRI, adds, “This remarkable study shines light on the unique Simms collection, which the Getty Research Institute is privileged to steward and to share.”
Gail Feigenbaum, associate director of the GRI and head of the GRI’s publishing program, states, “From the outset, Louis Marchesano wanted a publication that let readers see into Kollwitz’s thinking process as she tried, changed, erased, discarded, and reworked her ideas. Unlike the excellent surveys of Kollwitz’s work, this book focuses on a small group of projects, exploring the sequences of preparatory prints and drawings to show how the artist sought to achieve a perfect intensity of expression.”
