Kollwitz

The situation is starting to improve, as demonstrated with recent exhibitions by the German painter, printmaker and sculptor ��ä�ٳ�� Kollwitz at MoMA in New York, the Ukrainian American Abstract Expressionist painter Janet Sobel at the city’s Ukrainian Museum, and the painter Christina Ramberg at the Art Institute of Chicago.

I can think of no better balm than the Museum of Modern Art’s ��ä�ٳ�� Kollwitz retrospective, the first ever at a New York museum that encompasses this German artist’s groundbreaking prints and drawings and her sculpture, posters and magazine illustrations.

Born in 1867, Kollwitz was an avowed socialist whose career stretched from the 1890s to the 1940s, a period of tremendous social upheaval and two world wars.

With “Peasants’ War,” Kollwitz again turned to the past to share her outrage at the injustices around her “which are never ending and as large as a mountain.”

Unlike Eugène Delacroix’s 1830 image of a beautiful and bare-breasted personification of French freedom, Kollwitz’s crone is shown from the back, her sinewy arms raised and hands clenched urgently, practically launching herself into the crowd.