Käthe Kollwitz

Born Käthe Schmidt on 8 July 1867, she trained across painting, printmaking, and sculpture, but found her sharpest edge in the graphic arts—etching, lithography, woodcuts. Her early cycles, The Weavers and The Peasant War, depicted poverty, hunger, and war with a realism that burned. Over time her work shifted toward Expressionism, the forms growing starker, the emotion more raw. In 1919 she became the first woman elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts, and later the first to hold honorary professor status. She died in Germany on 22 April 1945, two weeks before the war ended.