With the currently authoritative catalogue raisonné, Otto Nagel — a fellow artist, long-standing companion and friend of Käthe Kollwitz — undertook for the first time the attempt to record, catalogue and reproduce the artist's drawings, which are scattered all over the world; the true extent of Käthe Kollwitz's drawn œuvre, however, can only be estimated.
Käthe Kollwitz, Die Handzeichnungen
Edited by Otto Nagel with the collaboration of Sibylle Schallenberg-Nagel and the advice of Hans Kollwitz, scholarly editing by Werner Timm.
474 pages, 150 black-and-white plates, œuvre catalogue with 1,355 illustrations, hardback, bookjacket.
Henschel-Verlag, Berlin/GDR 1972, 2nd edition 1980, licensed edition Kohlhammer, Stuttgart, 1980.
In 1972, an œuvre catalogue appeared for the first time, bringing together the almost 1,300 drawings by Käthe Kollwitz known up to that point. It was edited by Otto Nagel with the collaboration of Sibylle Schallenberg-Nagel and the advice of Dr Hans Kollwitz, the artist's son. After Otto Nagel's death in the summer of 1967, the scholarly editing was transferred to Dr Werner Timm.
The second and final revision of the catalogue raisonné was carried out in 1980 and, like the first edition, was published by Henschelverlag Kunst und Gesellschaft in Berlin (East). In the same year, a West German licensed edition appeared from Verlag W. Kohlhammer in Stuttgart.
To this day, the œuvre catalogue is regarded as the authoritative publication on the artist's drawings for scholarly research.
As a Kollwitz research institution, the Kollwitz Museum Köln has made it its task to collect and archive all relevant new information concerning the drawings and to revise existing knowledge.
Alongside updated ownership details and provenances, work-immanent information such as paper dimensions, technique or inscriptions is continually corrected, added and documented.
In addition, to date almost 200 works unknown to the authors of the catalogue raisonné have been identified and catalogued.
