Kathe Kollwitz and Salvador Dali: Through the Madness

Breanna Castaneda

Professor Long

ARTH 102.01

29 September 2013

Kathe Kollwitz and Salvador Dali: Through the Madness

            Kathe Kollwitz was a German artist specializing in drawing, painting, sculpture and printmaking. She was profoundly influenced by war, human suffering and poverty, and shared her political activism during Hitler’s reign in Europe and her own pain through her works. Most of her work conveys a strong emotional distress, a melancholy hell that she found after suffering the loss of her son during World War I. In many of her works she often depicts naturalistic proportions and makes wide use of the hands and face. These two elements, the hands and face, were often heightened in her drawings to emphasize their emotional power within the human body. They are two aspects that convey beauty, grace, delicacy and even pain, hardship and morbidity. Similarly to her paintings and drawings, as the hands lend her works a rawness to help display true humanity, her approach to such delicate topics is strikingly heartbreaking. She indeed utilized the darkness of her subject matter to produce a beautiful piece in technique, but ultimately the true essence of her subject was gravely morbid.

            In contrast to Kollwitz’s natural style of drawing, Salvador Dali excelled in surrealism and painting. While her pain absorbed Kollwitz, Dali lived life like a fashionable man in the twenties should. His grand and frivolous lifestyle consisted of that a celebrity. He was celebrated for his participation as a radical in the Surrealist party and Dali was most influenced by the concept of psychoanalysis and the work of Sigmund Freud, a prominent figure in the world of psychology. He believed that the state of unconscious one envelops during the resting state produced an experience where one would separate with the natural world. Essentially he was moved and highly influenced by his dreams and demonstrating his more personal and private desires within his paintings.  Dali’s works are as if one was to place themselves in the middle of a twisted dream, where the world around them has gone mad and a wry.

            Dali’s paintings in contrast to Kollwitz’s drawings represent his deeper emotional and personal desires from dream-like states more than human suffering. Not to say he did not exert a certain amount of pain and rawness in his works, for example in his painting The Specter of Sex Appeal, we can see the dreamy essence but understand the feminine figure’s broken, agonizing pain as it is observed through a childlike innocence which is illuminated by the young boy watching from below. Relating back to Kollwitz’s drawings, although very beautiful and very true to the human body’s natural form, one can see an obvious darkness in them. She used dark tones in her pieces to display the not so subtle sadness of her work itself. For example, her piece “Mother with Dead Child” is captured with her contrast between the dark and light tones within the subject. The subject’s content alone offers a painful reminder of the horrible reality of life, a theme she was all but too familiar with. Both artists produced works that represented parts of their pasts, however Kollwitz implored her past upon her viewers whereas Dali kept his as a hidden subtlety 

The Spectre of Sex Appeal, Salvador Dali

1934, oil on canvas

The Great Masturbator, Salvador Dali

1929, oil on canvas

Woman with her Dead Child, Kathe Kollwitz

1903, drawing

The Prisoners, Kathe Kollwitz

1908, etching on paper

Images From

 "The Spectre of Sex Appeal by Salvador Dali on Friends-of-art.net." The Spectre of Sex Appeal by Salvador Dali on Friends-of-art.net. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Dec. 2013.

 "VIAGRA & PROZAC." : Agosto 2006. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Dec. 2013.

 "Woman with Dead Child." - Kathe Kollwitz. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Dec. 2013.

"Käthe Kollwitz [1867-1945]." Käthe Kollwitz [1867-1945]. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Dec. 2013.