print;
portfolio
- Museum number
- 1981,1107.25
- Title
-
Object: Eine Mutter III (A Mother III)
-
Series: Dramen, Opus IX
- Description
-
Plate V: Courtroom interior. The mother, on the left, accused of having murdered her son, is put before a jury. The six men are seated around a centrally positioned table, which is lit by six large lamps from above. 1883
Etching and aquatint.
- Production date
- 1883
- Dimensions
-
Height: 454 millimetres
-
Width: 359 millimetres
- $Inscriptions
-
- Curator's comments
- Text from Frances Carey & Antony Griffiths, 'The Print in Germany 1880-1933', BM 1984, no.15
Klinger added a short explanatory text concerning these three prints to the introduction to the fifth edition of 'Dramen'. It can be translated: "Subject: a family thrown into poverty by bankruptcy. The husband, become a drunkard, mistreats wife and child [Plate III (1981,1107.23)]. She, in utter despair, jumps with her child into the water. The child drowns, she is rescued and revived [Plate IV (1981,1107.24)]: prosecuted for manslaughter and attempted suicide -she is acquitted. Berlin assize courts, summer 1881" [Plate V (1981,1107.25)]. The drama is firmly set into a social and historical context. The great crash of 1873, following a huge economic boom after the victory in the Franco-Prussian War, ushered in two decades of slow growth and periodic recession which intensified the problems of the newly expanding cities; the sad tragedy of the mother whose unemployed husband had turned to drink must have been typical in the Berlin of 1881. Klinger enhances the drama by a minute realism in detail of costume and topography, and the contrast in the second scene between the still mourners below and the excited crowd above is very moving. The grand building in the background is inscribed "Akademie" and "deutsche Kunst", and Klinger would seem to be making an ironical juxtaposition of the pretensions of academic German art and the grim commonplaceness of the subject of his own art.
These plates had a powerful influence on later German artists. The same theme of the mother committing suicide with her child is found in the work of Hans Baluschek (in 1891), Heinrich Zille (in 'Simplicissimus', 1904) and Käthe Kollwitz (in 'Simplicissimus', 1909).
For more information about the series, please see comment for Plate I (1981,1107.21).
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
1984/5 Sept.-Jan., BM, 'The Print in Germany 1880-1933', no.15
- Acquisition date
- 1981
- Acquisition notes
- See 1981,1107.21
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- 1981,1107.25