Kollwitz Museum Köln

Krystyna Kisielewicz 4 months ago

Small but wonderful.

Alison Sandle 4 months ago

Prepare to be rendered speechless. The emotional impact of Kollwitz's art is beyond expression, as is the fact that the issues she addressed so acutely (war, poverty, oppression of women) are as current now as they were a century ago.

Lilia Faizova 5 months ago

Käthe Kollwitz spent her career drawing people the art world preferred not to look at. Weavers. Peasants. Mothers in wartime. Workers. The faces in her prints and drawings are not beautiful in any conventional sense — they’re specific, which is harder and more lasting. She lost her son Peter in WWI and her grandson in WWII and kept working. The work knows what it knows. The museum is small, hidden inside a shopping gallery at Neumarkt — take the glass elevator to the fourth floor, which is its own small drama. The collection is the largest in the world. The biographical context woven through the exhibition makes the progression of her work legible in a way that standalone pieces don’t. Not a comfortable visit. Worth it precisely because of that.

Veronika K. a year ago

This museum concentrates on drawings, prints and sketches rather than sculptures. I was very impressed by the elaborate techniques she was able to employ - I had no idea. You can learn a lot about Kollwitz’ personal life and development, too. Well worth a visit. Though in the city centre we found it a bit hard to find the entrance: you have to enter the passage between the Sparkasse and a café at Neumarkt and then walk through to the very end from where you will have to take a lift to the 4th floor. Some more signage would have been good.

Vincent Riordan 6 years ago

A fantastic collection of this artist who had an acute ability to capture the lives of her people and her times. Print series like "The Weavers", "The Peasants Revolt" and " War" sharply depict the lot of ordinary people, their anger and their hope for a better life. The War series reflects also her own grief at the loss of her oldest son in WWI. I didn't know anything about Käthe Kollwitz before I visited the museum. I came away with a strong sense that she was an important witness of her times, an artist with a vision both sharp and tender, and one that probably deserves to be better known outside Germany than I suspect she is.