Germany
Käthe Kollwitz
1867–1945 Artist; memorial and War cycle after her son's death, 1914–1932
Born in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), Käthe Kollwitz studied art in Berlin and Munich, married the doctor Karl Kollwitz in 1891 and made her name with the print cycles The Weavers and The Peasant War. Her younger son Peter was killed in battle in October 1914, and she spent years on a memorial to him and his comrades, planned from 1914 on. The Grieving Parents was placed at Roggevelde in Belgium in 1932. A committed socialist and pacifist, she made the woodcut cycle War in 1922–23. In 1919 she became the first woman member of the Prussian Academy of Arts, but the Nazis forced her to resign in 1933. She died in Moritzburg on 22 April 1945.