LONG LOOK | OPINION: At AMFA, Käthe Kollwitz’s 1920 woodcut explores grief beyond politics

Käthe Kollwitz’s 1920 woodcut “In Memoriam Karl Liebknecht” depicts workers mourning the murdered Communist leader. On loan from Berlin’s Willy Brandt House, it is part of “The Age of Anxiety: German Expressionism in Art and Film” at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts through Jan. 10. (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/Philip Martin)

The dead man lies beneath a gathering of bowed heads, his pale covered body extending across the dark mass of the mourners’ clothes. The arrangement recalls the Christian lamentation paintings of Rogier van der Weyden; the subject brings to mind Jacques-Louis David’s “The Death of Marat,” in which an assassinated revolutionary receives the reverence traditionally accorded a saint.