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Käthe Kollwitz for the Worcester Art Museum

Museum Acquisition

Käthe Kollwitz, Mutter mit Kind über der Schulter
(Die Darbietung), before 1917 / 1961, Bronze,
46,3 x 29,7 x 28,4 cm / 18 ¼ x 11 ¾ x 11 1/8 in

TEFAF Maastricht is known to be one of the largest and most exclusive art fairs in the world. Every year, more than 50,000 art lovers and collectors visit the fair and it also attracts curators of major international museums in search of potential new acquisitions.
It is our great pleasure to announce that this year we have arranged for a particularly beautiful work by the artist Käthe Kollwitz to be permanently shown at the Worcester Art Museum.

Since its founding in 1896, the Worcester Art Museum has assembled a collection of 38,000 objects: from the ancient Near East and Asia, to European and American paintings and sculptures, and continuing with works by contemporary artists from around the world.
The Museum strives to build a collection that supports the institution's mission: Connecting people, communities, and cultures through the experience of art. The museum maintains a commitment to acquire exceptional, high-quality works and seeks objects that underscore its engagement in developing an encyclopedic museum for the twenty-first century. For this purpose, the diversity of the collection will be continually expanded in terms of geographic and historical origins, media, cultural background, and identity of the artist.

The sculpture “Mutter mit Kind über der Schulter (Die Darbietung)” is one of three or four casts of this model authorized by Hans Kollwitz in 1961. Since the artist herself did not have any reproductions of the original made during her lifetime, these are the first ever mouldings of this figuration in bronze. The work is one of only a few sculptural designs by Käthe Kollwitz that do not favour one particular perspective; it is clearly created in the round, in the style of a figura serpentinata, so that the figures can be viewed from several different angles. This concept could be the artist’s response to early criticism of her sculptural work, in which she was accused of a lack of real three-dimensionality in the realization of her visual ideas.