Coral's Art History Blog: Georgia O’Keefe & Kathe Kollwitz #8

If you think about it there aren’t that many well-known female artists in history that you could name off the top of your head, and it’s hard to indicate exactly why. A possible reason is that for many centuries women weren’t taken seriously, so their work might have not seemed as valuable at the time, thankfully times have changed. But two female artists did manage to be noticed for their talent, their names are Georgia O’Keefe and Kathe Kollwitz. These artists both had two very different styles of expression and medium.

Georgia O’Keefe is a famous American artist who was born in Wisconsin 1887. She had always wanted to be an artist since she was young and eventually studied at an art school in Chicago. She went on to teach some drawing classes in Texas then eventually moved to New Mexico, because she loved the geography there. Both Texas and New Mexico inspired her artwork through landscapes, animal skulls and flowers. Her painting style and subject is very unique and the colors she uses are very bright and bold. Her paintings are simple but memorable because of the bright colors of her flowers or background for the skulls. Unlike most peoples perspective she thought of skulls as representations of eternal life even after death, and they also were beautiful to her. Regardless of your view on skulls all of her paintings do give off a sense of beauty in nature. The way she paints in either watercolor or oil paint is so soft in the way she makes gradual tonal change from color to color

Kathe Kollwitz is a German artist who was born 1867 in Konigsberg. Her parents wanted her to be interested in politics; although she didn’t go into politics she then incorporated her interest in politics with her talent in drawing. The combination formed a very emotionally dark representation of what was taking place around her. She identified most with suffering in working mothers, deaths, illnesses and in the poor. She was really skilled in capturing the emotions on the paper, just by looking at her work you know exactly what the story is and how those subjects feel. It’s easy to see why her artwork got attention, mainly because of the graphicness and honesty of how she perceived life at that time. Her use of lithograph or charcoal on white paper just adds to the suffering of the subject. Georgia O’Keeffe was inspired by nature and colors around her but Kathe Kollwitz was inspired by struggles and suffering of those around her. These two artists had very different perspectives of what drove their imagination.