“It is my duty to voice the sufferings of men,” Käthe Kollwitz once wrote, “the never-ending sufferings heaped mountain-high.” Kollwitz’s early life in the city of Königsberg, Prussia, in the 1870s, was shadowed by grief. The period was fraught with war, marked by industrialization, and two of her siblings died. Kollwitz studied to be an artist, bringing a distinctive realism to her depictions of the working class and its hardships. She soon realized that drawing was her gift, not painting, and she believed that drawing and printmaking were more effective mediums for social criticism. Though Kollwitz was ahead of her time, she did not receive the same recognition as her male peers. In the first Kollwitz retrospective in a New York museum, her very human, very radical images shine. —Elena Clavarino