KOLLWITZ 2025.192

A powerful and haunting work, Hunger is typical of the deep-rooted humanity that underpins Kollwitz’s artmaking. Created in response to the suffering she witnessed during World War One, the work shows the anguished figure of a mother cradling her child’s emaciated body, which resembles little more than a jumble of bones. Kollwitz’s rough-hewn linework and liberal use of black ink heightens the raw emotional intensity of the scene, while the un-inked passages delineate the skeletal forms of both figures in this strikingly expressive portrayal of deprivation. Highly stylised representations of maternal grief, mourning and death assumed a new intensity of feeling in Kollwitz’s work following the death of her son, Peter, on the battlefield.