I am delighted to be among the recipients of the Royal Irish Academy’s Charlemont Grants, which are awarded to outstanding early career researchers in the humanities, social sciences and sciences. The scheme facilitates short international visits from Ireland for the conduct of primary research. The grant will enable me to continue researching my book project on German artist Otto Dix’s war pictures.
Abstract: This essay explores Käthe Kollwitz’s anti-war graphic work in the context of the German, and later, international No More War movement from 1920 to 1925, where it performed an important role in anti-militarist campaigns, exhibitions and publications, both in Germany and internationally. Looking at Kollwitz’s production closely, we discover a deeply pragmatic artistic strategy, where the emotionality of Kollwitz’s famed prints was the result of tireless technical, formal and compositional investigation, contrived to maximise emotional impact. By choosing the easily disseminated medium of printmaking as her main vehicle and using a deliberately spare but powerful graphic language in carefully chosen motifs, Kollwitz intended her art to reach as broad an audience as possible in engaging anti-war sentiment. In connection with the leading anti-war voices of the time, including French Nobel Prize-winning writer Romain Rolland and the founder of War Resisters’ International, Helene Stöcker, she deployed her work to reach beyond the confines of the art gallery and into internationally distributed posters, periodicals and books. Keywords: World War I; German art; anti-war; Käthe Kollwitz; Weimar; printmaking; graphic art; anti-militarism; memory; memorialization; No More War movement; modernism. Read …
Dr Ann Murray 