Seen from a purely historical perspective, Kaethe Kollwitz would seem a good candidate for obscurity. Her drawings, prints and sculptures broke no new stylistic or technical ground. She was the only female artist of consequence among the German expressionists, but not a leading light. Much of her art was meant as protest against specific social conditions in Berlin, such as the poverty, hunger and misery she witnessed in the poor neighborhood on the city's north side where she lived with her physician husband, Karl. But 53 years after her death, Kollwitz remains one of the most fascinating figures of 20th-century German art. Her continuing appeal stems from variables that sometimes elude history's cold calculus: the unflagging determination to use her considerable artistic gifts to serve humanity; a brutal honesty as an observer of the world and her self; and, most important, an immense heart, which never hardened. Kaethe Kollwitz was a radical humanist who didn't pay lip service to the suffering of others, but felt and lived it.

A sampling of Kollwitz's intense, gripping images covering the years from 1892 to 1934 is currently on exhibition at Robert Brown Gallery. Like all her work, the 21 lithographs, etchings and woodcuts on display detail the tragedies and joys of human existence: war, death, illness and maternal and familial love. Because of the universality of her themes, pictures based on little-known events from German history -- such as "Riot," an etching from her 1897 series "Revolt of the Weavers" -- still

While Kollwitz established her reputation with "Revolt of the Weavers" and a second series titled "Peasants' War," represented here by the chilling etching "Whetting the Scythe," in which a blind peasant fingers the freshly sharpened edge, it is her later works that speak most directly to contemporary life. As she grew older, Kollwitz continually pared away extraneous detail, focusing her prints and drawings on the figures in the center of the paper and leaving the background blank.

This produced a series of stark, black-and-white images of amazing variety and vibrancy. Some she conjured from wisps of smoke, streaks of twilight and frayed pools of shade. Others seem to well up from a coal-black hole deep inside the paper. It is a magnetic blackness. In "Death Holding a Girl in His Lap," a lithograph from her 1934 series titled "Death," the young girl's profile is outlined as her face presses into Death's black hair, hiding his features. Looking at the girl's face, one sees no fear or pain, just release.

That kind of precise, unflinching scrutiny is a Kollwitz hallmark, and she applied it mercilessly to herself in a series of self-portraits that began when she was an art student and ended two years before her death in 1945. In power and poignancy they are surpassed only by Rembrandt's self-portraits. There are three self-portraits in the show, and the joys, sorrows and travails of Kollwitz's life can be seen in her face.

These pieces highlight another aspect of Kollwitz's work that sometimes gets short shrift: its uniquely feminine depth of emotion, openness and vulnerability. Kaethe Kollwitz was a sister, wife and mother who possessed an enormous capacity to love and nurture. Pictures such as the 1892 etching "Greeting," which was inspired by the birth of her first son and shows a working-class father returning home to his wife and child at day's end, are a testament to her love of family and home.

There was not a maudlin bone in Kollwitz's body and her art is never sentimental. Joy or tragedy, birth or death, she met them head-on with an open heart. Given the tumultuous, bloody history of her times, hardening her heart or turning away would have been easy, yet she never did. In November 1914, Kollwitz wrote to a friend who had given a gift to her son Peter: "The beautiful scarf can no longer warm our boy. He lies dead under the earth. He fell near Dixmuiden, the first in his regiment. He didn't have to suffer.

"At sunset, the regiment buried him. His friends laid him in the grave. Then they went to their terrible work. We thank God that he was so gently taken away before the slaughter."

Her unadorned, heart-wrenching statues of a grieving father and mother stand at the gates of the Belgian cemetery where her son is buried, a powerful monument to parents' love and devastating loss.