?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 5,000
KÄTHE KOLLWITZ Plakat Der Deutschen Heimarbeit-Ausstellung Berlin 1906.
Lithograph, 1906. 690x490 mm; 27⅛x19¼ inches, wide margins. Second state (of 3). Edition of 300. Signed in pencil, lower right. Published by H. Meysel, Berlin. A very good impression of this extremely scarce, early lithograph.
Kollwitz conceived this image for the poster announcing the January-February 1906 German Home Work Exhibition held in Berlin. Knesebeck cites an edition of 300 for the current second state of the lithograph, with the single line of text below the image, but notes that only 13 examples of the second state of the lithograph are known today (Knesebeck also cites an edition of approximately 1500 of the third state, poster edition, with full text, and notes only 22 extant examples).
According to the Käthe Kollwitz Museum Cologne, where there is an impression of the third state, poster edition as well as a preparatory charcoal drawing of the portrait of the worker woman, "The German Home Work Exhibition in 1906 was conceived by bourgeois social reformers and trade unions and was the first major exhibition on this topic in Germany. It took place in the center of Berlin Unter den Linden , the representative boulevard that is one of the most famous promenades in Germany in the Empire. The exhibition location was deliberately chosen because the aim was to make the 'polite society' aware of the catastrophic working and living conditions.
Käthe Kollwitz probably owes the commission for the poster to her cycle A Weavers' Revolt, [1893-97], which impressively describes the misery of home workers in the textile industry. On the poster, the artist also shows a woman who is visibly exhausted and overtired, staring into space. In the brightly lit face, the dark circles under the eyes and the sunken cheeks stand out even more clearly.
Since political posters were banned in Germany until 1914, the claim, which has been circulating since the 1920s, could be true that the Empress refused to visit the exhibition as long as Käthe Kollwitz's poster was displayed publicly--even more so than about the building in which the exhibition was shown 'The royal state government has to decide,' as the Berliner Tageblatt noted. Klipstein 93; Knesebeck 95.
