Art: Vivid portrayal of grief touches the heart

Although the Kathe Kollwitz Museum is in an old house with an inconspicuous entrance in a dull street just off the glittering Kurfurstendamm in Berlin, it houses one of the world's most moving - though one of its saddest - collections of art.

Berlin is a glittering city. It has been rebuilt twice since the war and the building activity that followed the fall of the Wall is almost complete.

Where a year ago you could count 40 or 50 cranes on the skyline near the Potsdamer Platz, fine modern buildings now stand proud. They include the vast new Painting Gallery filled with works from the former East and West Berlin.

Yet images of suffering still remain. At the end of the Ku-damm, past the fashionable shops, stand the ruins of a great church left as a memorial and nearby is the museum.

Three storeys of an old house are given over to the works of Kathe Kollwitz, surely one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. She devoted herself tirelessly to expressing the sufferings of the poor.

One reason why her art is not better known is that most of her work is etchings, woodcuts and lithographs which don't hang alongside the paintings of the great European art museums but have to be sought in graphic art collections.

The starkness of her works are emphasised by the way they are almost entirely in black and white.

The little museum in Berlin offers the greatest opportunity to see Kollwitz's achievements as a whole.

She was born in Konigsberg in 1867 and had an academic training as an artist. Her family were devoutly religious and idealistic. In 1891 she married Karl Kollwitz, a doctor who worked in the poorest parts of Berlin.

Her early work was profoundly influenced by a celebrated play Die Weber (The Weavers) by German dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann. It grimly depicted the trapped life of the poorest of the poor. Zola's novel Germinal, about the hard life of miners in France, was also a major influence. Both inspired a series of engravings that captured the spirit of the works in gloomy but powerful prints.

Kollwitz also embarked on a series of prints that evoked the suffering of the poor during the Peasants War of the Middle Ages. At the same time she continually did work that showed the plight of her contemporaries in Berlin who lived on the edge of starvation.

Her tragic view of the world is reflected in the stern features that emerge from her many self-portraits. Like Rembrandt, she did dozens of self-portraits analysing the effect life had on her features.

Her personal suffering was increased when her second son, Peter, who went to war with high patriotic hopes, was killed in Flanders in October 1914.

In 1919 she was the first woman to be elected to the Prussian Academy of Art, with the title of professor. This was in spite of, rather than because of, her passionate involvement in socialism. One of her most famous works is a picture of the Karl Liebknecht, the socialist leader who was murdered by reactionary forces. Equally celebrated was her poster Nie Wieder Krieg (No More War). In the twenties she journeyed in the Soviet Union and had exhibitions in Moscow and Leningrad.

Kollwitz had often worked in sculpture as well as in printmaking and in 1931 completed sculptures of a father and mother in mourning, to be erected in a Flanders cemetery as a memorial to her dead son. The sorrowing mother is a consistent theme in all her work.

Her suffering seemed to have no end. The Nazis forced her to resign from the academy and by 1935 she was working on her own gravestone. She was forbidden to exhibit her work. In 1940 her husband died. In 1942 her grandson, also called Peter, was killed in Russia. In 1943 she was evacuated from Berlin but her house and many of her plates and prints were destroyed by bombs. She died in 1945.

Her achievement lives on. The Kathe Kollwitz Museum shows how, totally without false sentiment, she depicts the struggles of the downtrodden.

Some work immediately makes you think of the artist; some makes you think of humanity, and you forget the artist.

Some of Kollwitz's early work is full of sweeping movement, such as when peasants swarm into a castle to seize weapons. But much of it has the weight and monumentality of Michelangelo, such as when she draws a worker, exhausted with fatigue, asleep at a table.

When she addresses the subject of war, as she did in the 1920s, it is not the movement of armies that she depicts but the grieving parents left behind. In a woodcut called The Parents a couple are locked together in grief; the hacking cuts on the woodblock are like the cuts of fate and together they make a heavy shape like a lump of stone. Grief is the keynote of her work and it touches all humanity that venture into the little elegant villa that is her museum and memorial.