Lotte Laserstein

The German-Swedish artist Lotte Laserstein is not only considered to be one of the great 20th century realists, but also one of the most exciting rediscoveries in recent years. From the late 1980s well-attended exhibitions, in London, Berlin, Frankfurt, Kiel, Malmö and Stockholm, has offered, a wide and appreciative audience, a chance to explore the long-forgotten work of Laserstein, whilst also clearly demonstrating that her oeuvre belongs in the 20th century art historical canon.

Laserstein’s artistic career began in Berlin in the 1920s. After becoming one of the first women to graduate from the Academy of Arts in Berlin in 1927, and with honours at that, she quickly made a name for herself on the multifaceted art scene of the metropolis. With her striking portraits, brilliantly composed studio scenes and depictions of emancipated urban women, Laserstein also captured the spirit of the Weimar Republic era (9 November 1918 – 23 March 1933).

Born in Preussisch Holland (a city in former East Prussia, present-day Poland) she moved with her mother Meta and sister Käte (her father, Hugo, had died prematurely in 1902), via Bad Neuheim and Danzig, to Berlin in 1912. Having received initial art training, in a school run by her aunt Elsa Birnbaum, from 1909, she later (in 1920) took lessons from painter Leo von König (1871 – 1944, a Berlin Secession painter who had made a name for himself for portrait paintings and drawings of nudes). The following year (women were finally permitted to attend art academies in Germany from 1919) she enrolled in the Akademische Hochschule für die bildenden Künste (Academy of Fine Arts), where she studied for six years under Professor Erich Wolfsfeld (1884 – 1956, a painter known for his realistic renderings of beggars and down-and-outs), and was for her last two years his Atelier Meisterschuler - star pupil - which entitled her to her own studio at the academy.

Despite the bias against women - only a handful were enrolled - Laserstein won the academy’s gold medal in 1925 (around the same time that she befriended Gertrud “Traute” Rose [1903 – 1989], who would become her muse and most important model during the years in Berlin). In 1927 Laserstein, an accomplished realist painter, moved into her first own studio and soon had her own pupils. Early success came in 1928, when the City of Berlin acquired her painting Im Gasthaus / In the Tavern (1927, oil on wood, 54 x 46 cm, private collection, Germany), and 1931, when her solo exhibition at the Gurlitt Gallery in Berlin garnered critical praise. Around this time, she also joined the Verein der Berliner Künstlerinnen (an association for female artists fostering artistic development and opportunities for the public exhibition of women), where she, intermittently, served on the board along with Käthe Kollwitz (1867 – 1945), until the Nazis threw her out.

During this time, women were growing in independence and were increasingly able to enter workplaces as well as public life. Laserstein depicted contemporary women of many fashions including, so called, Neue Frauen (“New Women”) types who adopted a freer (and sometimes more masculine) look (Polly Tieck, 1929, oil on canvas, 90 x 80 cm, private collection, Sweden), and female nudes (Traute Rose / Rear View of Sitting Nude, c. 1930, oil on canvas, 70.5 x 56 cm, private collection, Belgium). As a successful professional and single woman, Laserstein herself embodied the “New Woman” of the Weimar era, and her androgynous look is evident in her many self-portraits, for example, Selbstportrait mit Katze /Self-portrait with A Cat (1928, oil on plywood, 61 x 51 cm, Leicester Museum and Art Gallery), which also relates to one of the world’s most famous self-portraits: Albrecht Dürer’s (1471 – 1528) Selbstbildnis mit Landschaft / Self-portrait (1498, oil on wood panel, 52 x 41 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid).

Her most famous paintings, including Tennisspielerin / The Tennis Player (1929, oil on canvas, 110 x 95.5 cm, private collection, Germany), contributed to the verism of New Objectivity movement but also showed continuity with German Naturalism. Laserstein’s masterpiece was the large painting Abend über Potsdam / Evening over Potsdam (1930, oil on panel, 110 x 205 cm, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie), a frieze of friends sharing a meal on their terrace, with Potsdam’s skyline arrayed in the far distance. The elegiac scene references Leonardo da Vinci’s (1452 – 1519) Il Cenacolo / Last Supper (c. 1495 – 1498, tempera on gesso, 460 x 880 cm, Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan, Italy) and Johannes Vermeer von Delft’s (1632 – 1675) De melkmeid / Milkmaid (c. 1657 – 1658, oil on canvas, 45.5 x 41 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) in order to convey the temporality and political stalemate of 1930.

Professor Dorothy Price FBA (art historian based at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London) writes (in ‘Lotte Laserstein and New Objectivity in Germany’, article in [Ed.] Iris Müller-Westermann & Anna-Carola Krausse, Lotte Laserstein. A Divided Life, exhibition catalogue, Moderna Museet, Malmö & Stockholm, 2023):The extraordinary paintings produced by Laserstein in Berlin during the final years of the failed utopia of the Weimar Republic work at the interface between gender, sexuality, modernity, mass culture, and New Objectivity. Yet her decision to engage in modern subjects via the traditional media of paint on canvas challenged the dominant conventions of both mass cultural representation and fine art practice. Laserstein’s modernity rested on her ability to capture the fleeting vagaries of Neue Sachlichkeit fashion in an enduring form of painterly realism that continues to speak to viewers across the twentieth century and into today.

Despite her increasing success, the rise of Nazism in Germany began to affect Laserstein’s life. Because her paternal grandfather had been Jewish, Laserstein’s mother’s apartment and many of her valuables were confiscated by the state (her mother, Meta Laserstein, would later be murdered, aged 73, in the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück, in 1943). It became difficult for Laserstein to find artists’ materials, and in 1935 she was forced to close her studio, which meant that she lost an important source of income.

Defined by the German government as a Jew Laserstein was increasingly excluded from the art scene in the following years. Thanks to an invitation from Galerie Moderne in Stockholm, she managed to leave Germany, taking some of her most important work with her to Sweden in December 1937. The following year she entered an arranged marriage of convenience with Jewish merchant Sven Jakob Marcus, thus assuring herself of Swedish citizenship and permanent residency. She ended up spending the rest of her life, and artistic career, in the country (from 1959 in Kalmar, 300 kilometers to the south of Stockholm), developing a reputation as a popular, and respected, portraitist as well as becoming a member of Konstnärernas Riksorganisation, the Swedish Artists’ Association in 1963 (having, unsuccessfully, applied for membership since 1948).

Having lived in, more or less, provincial obscurity for decades Laserstein, finally, was rediscovered and recognized internationally (her 80th birthday, in 1978, had been marked by a major retrospective in her hometown of Kalmar which also awarded her the City of Kalmar Cultural Prize in 1977) in 1987, when London-based galleries Thomas Agnew & Sons and the Belgrave Gallery organized a joint exhibition, with accompanying sale, of works from her personal collection, including Abend über Potsdam which, at a later stage (19th Century European Paintings, Sotheby’s, London, 2 June 2010), was bought by Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie for £421,250. Laserstein attended the exhibition together with her close friend and model of many decades, Traute Rose. The exhibition led to her painting Traute Washing / Morning Toilette (1930, oil on panel, 100 x 65 cm) being acquired by the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. (the first purchase by the museum with its own funds).

This was followed up by the first comprehensive retrospective of Laserstein’s oeuvre, curated by Anna-Carola Krausse PhD (born 1962, Berlin-based art historian) and organized by Das Verborgene Museum, Berlin (Lotte Laserstein 1898 - 1993 – Meine einzige Wirklichkeit, 6 November 2003 – 1 February 2004), in partnership with the Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin, Museum Ephraim Palais. The exhibition which contributed significantly to the rediscovery of the artist in German-speaking countries was accompanied by the exhibition catalogue/book, Lotte Laserstein. Meine einzige Wirklichkeit / Lotte Laserstein: My Only Reality (written by Krausse). In 2009, the Berlinische Galerie acquired the artist’s documentary estate as a private donation. In addition to photographs of her work, the material includes sketchbooks, private and professional correspondence, documents on her participation in exhibitions, and books from Laserstein’s library.

The reawakened interest in Laserstein manifested itself further in the exhibition Lotte Laserstein: Face to Face at Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Germany (19 September 2018 – 17 March 2019); Berlinische Galerie, Museum für modern Kunst, Berlin (5 April - 12 August 2019) and Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Germany (21 September 2019 – 19 January 2020). Recent exhibitions include Lotte Laserstein - Ett delat liv / Lotte Laserstein -A Divided Life at Moderna Museet, Malmö, Sweden (6 May – 1 October 2023), which later travelled to Moderna Museet, Stockholm (11 November 2023 – 14 April 2024).

Lotte Laserstein passed away, at the age of 94, on 21 January 1993.

Copyright Firestorm Foundation