Gefallen (Original Title) 1920

This is Kathe Kollwitz’s 'Gefallen', and you can see it at the Städel Museum. It's made with a stick of charcoal, or maybe a very soft pencil, and it looks like it came into being through a haze of feeling, smudging, rubbing, and re-defining, over and over. I imagine Kollwitz standing there, drawing into the paper, the charcoal almost an extension of her nervous system, as she draws the figure of the mother, surrounded by children. The downward drag of the marks is like gravity itself, pulling everything down into sorrow, a kind of weeping. I wonder if she ever felt like she got it right, or if she kept going, adding more and more marks, each one a little cry of anguish. Look at the children's faces, and the mother's gesture. Can you feel the weight of her hands? It’s like she's saying, “This is what it feels like. This is the weight of loss." Artists, we’re all in this ongoing conversation, trying to figure out what it means to be human, and how to express that with charcoal, or paint, or whatever we can get our hands on.