Word: kollwitz
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...happens every year. Kathe Kollwitz returns to Cambridge. War ravages the land. Someone mentions pathos comparing Kollwitz to Goya. A chorus nods its appreciation of pathos and it is left for some meek, distant voice to observe that Goya, however, remains a formidable criterion...
...inevitable none the less. Captive soldiers with grim, tormented faces and exhausted bodies suffer abominably in the grip of barbed wire. Death incarnate descends its dark, all-powerful might into the midst of struggling children and takes war's most horrifying toll. Humanitarian aspirations and instincts as epitomized by Kollwitz in the spirit of motherhood suffer and die under the relentless blow of man's inhumanity...
...point continually arises that Kollwitz is, after all, an "Expressionist," a wielder of emotions who prefers impulsive, intuitive reactions to intellectualized or classic ones. No answer speaks more eloquently than the suffering "expressionist" figures of Rouault, whose silent anguish mirrors not only torment and martyrdom but that essential dignity of art defined by Malraux as "the voice of silence." The difference, again, is aesthetic, not literary. Kollwitz cries out against war; Rouault affirms the artistry war destroys. One is advocacy and the other...
...York born Ralph Rosenborg, whose oils and watercolors accompany Kollwitz's graphic work at the Gropper, pursues art with precisely this aesthetic criterion in mind. A newcomer to the Cambridge scene, Rosenborg's work has never come closer than Provincetown despite some three hundred exhibitions both in this country and abroad. Displayed here, to the delightful if somewhat dubious accompaniment of a console offering Rossini's Barber of Seville at one moment and Brahms' Hungarian Rhapsodies the next, these unpretentious canvases gain much from understatement...
...schism between poetry and Strum and Drang lies in intensity of emotion or dramatic nature of the subject. Actually Goya's "Disasters of War," certainly more graphic than anything here, or Picasso's "Guernica," more symbolic and abstract than anything here, answer an emphatic no. For if Barlach, Kollwitz, Grosz, et al, utter an emotional cry from the blackness of chaos and confusion, it is Picasso and Goya who offer, with emotion disciplined. "right" and "inevitable," an answer which cannot help being true...