Bread! 1924

Kathe Kollwitz made this drawing, “Bread!” with charcoal. The starkness of the monochrome palette throws the urgency of the situation into sharp relief. It’s a process of reduction, literally stripping back the layers of representation to highlight the raw emotional core. Look at how Kollwitz uses these intense, almost violent lines to define the mother’s form. The texture is rough, almost like the charcoal is fighting the paper. You can almost feel the weight of the figure leaning forward, the children clinging to her skirts, their faces desperate and pleading. The way Kollwitz has drawn the mouth of the child on the left, wide open and howling. It’s as if that one mark encapsulates the universal scream of hunger, the desperation that echoes through history. Like Goya, Kollwitz never shied away from depicting the harsh realities of life, offering us a window into the struggles of the working class. Art like this invites us to confront uncomfortable truths.