케테 콜비츠의 노동하지 않는 노동자 이미지 연구

Abstract

Käthe Kollwitz, famous for her works, which accuse the dark side of industrial society at that time by describing various workers, takes the working class as the main artistic motif throughout her life and gets inspiration from their lives, but paradoxically never deals with the moment when workers actually work. This paper examines the worker image created by Kollwitz and re-examines it from a critical perspective, noting the contradiction that the prints and drawings of Kollwitz extremely rarely show workers being in the main job. Kollwitz’s workers show up in a variety of situations, such as being out of their workplace, enjoying leisure, taking a short break while working, losing jobs and thus being confused. Kollwitz, who was initially fascinated by describing workers’ external characteristics and the unique environment and atmosphere of the working class, begins to focus on the tragic situation of workers’ families in large cities full of poverty and despair from the 1900s. Depicting the desperate appearance of home industrial workers located in time and space of labor with unclear physical and psychological boundaries, and of families suffering from unemployment, as well as of workers who have lost their families due to war, Kollwitz criticizes the society where people have to labor. This paper attempts to reveal the possibilities and limitations of the contradiction of Kollwitz’s image of a non-working worker.