Käthe Kollwitz Museum (Berlin)
Encyclopedia
The Käthe Kollwitz Museum in Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

 owns one of the largest collections of works by the German
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 artist Käthe Kollwitz
Käthe Kollwitz
Käthe Kollwitz was a German painter, printmaker, and sculptor whose work offered an eloquent and often searing account of the human condition in the first half of the 20th century...

 (1867–1945). Kollwitz lived and worked in Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg
Prenzlauer Berg
Prenzlauer Berg is a locality of Berlin, in the borough of Pankow.Until 2001, Prenzlauer Berg was a borough of Berlin; in that year it was included in the borough of Pankow....

 for over 50 years.

The museum opened in 1986, and traces its origins to the art collector Hans Pels-Leusden (d.1993). Pels-Leusden had been collecting the artist's works since 1950, and created his first Kollwitz exhibition in 1965. He endowed 95 printed
Printmaking
Printmaking is the process of making artworks by printing, normally on paper. Printmaking normally covers only the process of creating prints with an element of originality, rather than just being a photographic reproduction of a painting. Except in the case of monotyping, the process is capable...

 graphics
Graphic arts
A type of fine art, graphic art covers a broad range of art forms. Graphic art is typically two-dimensional and includes calligraphy, photography, drawing, painting, printmaking, lithography, typography, serigraphy , and bindery. Graphic art also consists of drawn plans and layouts for interior...

, 40 drawings and 10 original posters to the museum.

The museum now owns over 200 works, including prints, drawings, posters, sculptures and woodcut
Woodcut
Woodcut—occasionally known as xylography—is a relief printing artistic technique in printmaking in which an image is carved into the surface of a block of wood, with the printing parts remaining level with the surface while the non-printing parts are removed, typically with gouges...

s. Highlights include the lithograph
Lithography
Lithography is a method for printing using a stone or a metal plate with a completely smooth surface...

 Brot! (1924), the self-portraits, the woodcut cycle Krieg (1922/23), works on the theme of death, and a woodcut in remembrance of Karl Liebknecht
Karl Liebknecht
was a German socialist and a co-founder with Rosa Luxemburg of the Spartacist League and the Communist Party of Germany. He is best known for his opposition to World War I in the Reichstag and his role in the Spartacist uprising of 1919...

 (1919/1920). The upper floor contains a 2.1-metre-high sculpture of Kollwitz by Gustav Seitz.

There are special exhibitions roughly twice a year.

The museum is located on Fasanenstraße, in a villa from 1871 featuring late-classicist
Classicism
Classicism, in the arts, refers generally to a high regard for classical antiquity, as setting standards for taste which the classicists seek to emulate. The art of classicism typically seeks to be formal and restrained: of the Discobolus Sir Kenneth Clark observed, "if we object to his restraint...

 modifications from 1897. The building was partly destroyed during the Second World War, and not fully restored until the 1980s. It now forms part of the so-called Wintergartenensemble, together with the nearby Literaturhaus Berlin (including the Café Wintergarten) and the Villa Grisebach.
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