Lotte Laserstein

Lotte Laserstein (1898–1993) was a German-Swedish figurative painter who worked mainly in Berlin during the Weimar Republic and later lived in exile in Sweden. Her paintings of the 1920s and 1930s belong to the New Objectivity movement, and she is now remembered above all for her portraits of women and intellectuals.

Born in Preussisch Holland in East Prussia, now Pasłęk in Poland, she grew up in an assimilated German-Jewish family; her father was a pharmacist and her mother a pianist and porcelain painter. She trained at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin, which had only recently admitted women. There she studied under Erich Wolfsfeld and became one of his star pupils, which gave her a studio of her own and free access to models. The years between her graduation in 1927 and 1933 produced what is considered her best work, shown in numerous Berlin galleries and museums. During the hyperinflation she also painted cadavers for textbook illustrations.

Her subjects included the women of her day, among them the so-called New Woman with a more masculine look, and female nudes. As a single professional woman she embodied that type herself, as her many self-portraits show. Her most ambitious canvas is Abend über Potsdam (Evening over Potsdam, 1930), a frieze of friends dining on a terrace with the skyline of Potsdam in the distance, a pensive scene that reflects the political uncertainty of the period. Her close friend and model Traute Rose appears in many of her compositions.

The Nazi regime, together with her Jewish ancestry, forced her out of German artistic life in 1937, and she emigrated to Sweden, where she worked mainly as a portraitist and landscape painter. Her attempts to bring her mother and her sister Käte to Sweden failed; her mother was murdered in Ravensbrück. After the war her work is generally considered to have lost the force of her Berlin period.

Her reputation faded until 1987, when Thomas Agnew & Sons and the Belgrave Gallery staged a joint exhibition and sale of works from her personal collection. In 2003 the first comprehensive retrospective took place in Berlin, with a catalogue by Anna-Carola Krausse, and her work has since been featured in exhibitions on women painters and lesbian artists.