Käthe Kollwitz valuation

Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) was born Käthe Schmidt in Königsberg in Prussia, and studied art in Berlin and Munich, where she found her strength lay in drawing. She married Karl Kollwitz, a doctor, and they lived in a working-class district of Berlin, where his patients gave her many of her subjects. Her print cycles A Weavers' Revolt, after Gerhart Hauptmann's play The Weavers, and Peasants' War made her name, and the woodcut series War followed the loss of her son Peter in the first months of the First World War. Her granite figures of the Grieving Parents stand at the German war cemetery at Vladslo in Belgium. She was the first woman elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts, and in 1933 the new government forced her to resign from it.

Her etchings, lithographs and woodcuts come to market far more often than her drawings or bronzes, and many exist both as impressions printed in her lifetime and as editions printed later. The standard reference is the catalogue raisonné of her prints by Alexandra von dem Knesebeck, published in 2002, which records the states, editions and papers. A buyer will want to know which state and edition a sheet is, whether it is signed in pencil, and its condition: margins, foxing, fading and old hinges all matter. Bronzes should come with the foundry and the date of the cast.