Berlin Secession / Degenerate Art: Käthe Kollwitz
Self-Portrait with Eyes Closed, Tilted Backwards (Selbstbildnis mit geschlossenen Augen, nach hinten geneigt), 1909
Charcoal on paper
35.4 x 45.7 cm / Sheet approx. 37 x 47.5 cm
Private Collection

While a journey through Secession art usually keeps this blog focused on Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, it is worth looking at a work from Germany that shares their psychological depth. Käthe Kollwitz’s Self-Portrait with Eyes Closed, made in 1909, is a powerful example of how graphic art can capture the inner life by shutting out the external world.

This portrait avoids conventional vanity. Kollwitz depicts herself with her head tilted back and her eyes closed, creating a sense of deep concentration, introspection, or emotional exhaustion.

Context and the Berlin Secession

By 1909, artistic movements across Europe were shifting away from realism to focus on what lay beneath the surface. While Klimt used patterns to express melancholy and Schiele used contorted bodies to show anxiety, Kollwitz found her expression in the simplicity of tone and shadow.

As an influential member of the Berlin Secession, Kollwitz developed a style deeply rooted in social justice. Living and working in a poor working-class district of Berlin, where her husband Karl practiced medicine as a doctor for the poor, she chose to reject bourgeois subjects. Instead, she dedicated her career to depicting the raw reality of the human condition.

The closed eyes in this drawing do not represent sleep, but a deliberate withdrawal. It is a protective retreat from the harsh social realities of early 20th-century Germany—which Kollwitz documented through her images of the working class—into her own thoughts.

A Life Shaped by Empathy and Tragedy

To understand why Kollwitz created such heavy, somber works, one must look at her personal history. Long before the widespread destruction of the World Wars, her worldview was shaped by the daily suffering she witnessed in her husband’s clinic. She saw firsthand the effects of poverty, hunger, and infant mortality on families. Rather than painting comforting or decorative art, she felt a responsibility to use her talent as a voice for the vulnerable.

Though this 1909 portrait predates her greatest personal losses, it already reflects the immense emotional weight she carried as an observer. In 1914, her youngest son Peter was killed in action during World War I. While her older son, Hans, survived his military service, the loss of Peter transformed Kollwitz into a lifelong pacifist, turning her art into a monument for mourning mothers and lost children.

The later years of her life brought further hardship and grief. Her husband Karl passed away in 1940. Just two years later, in 1942, history repeated itself cruelly when her grandson—Hans’s son, who had been named Peter in memory of his late uncle—was killed on the Eastern Front. Kollwitz herself did not live to see the return of peace; she passed away in April 1945, only a few days before the official end of World War II in Europe.

Her art was never a commercial pursuit; it was an emotional necessity, an outlet to process both communal and deeply personal grief.

Technique and Composition

Kollwitz’s use of charcoal shows a clear economy of line. Dark smudges define the bone structure of her face, while the bare paper catches the light on her forehead and cheek. The absence of a background focuses attention entirely on the expression. This direct, uncompromising approach to identity shares a strong connection with Schiele’s early drawings from the same period.

The viewer is left with a profound sense of presence, catching a moment of rest or the heavy burden of the world behind those closed lids.