Käthe Kollwitz at the Brooklyn Museum

At once a haunting reflection on the First World War and a terrible premonition of the Second, the prints from Käthe Kollwitz's "War" and "Death" portfolios, currently on exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, make for harrowing but essential viewing. Kollwitz, who died only 8 days before Hitler and who was hounded out of the Academy of Arts by the Nazis, used a mix of humanistic sympathy and supernatural grotesquerie to capture the seemingly boundless capacity of humans to inflict suffering on one another. ("Every war is answered by a new war, until everything is smashed," she wrote.) Kollwitz argued that resisting violence was its own kind of struggle, and her unsettling images bolster those fighting the good fight.