Meret Becker on Lotte Laserstein
Meret Becker is convinced that she has already lived in another time - as a figure in a work by Lotte Laserstein. She takes a look back at the artist's life in Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s, the years before Laserstein was exiled. Meret Becker is convinced that she has already lived in another time - as a figure in a work by Lotte Laserstein. She takes a look back at the artist's life in Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s, the years before Laserstein was exiled.
UP CLOSE: In this series of short films, nine actors each look at one of the artists from the exhibition “CLOSE-UP”. Approaching the subject, they share their impressions in their own way and in their own words. The result, in each case, is a very personal portrait of the artist that says as much about the speaker as about the subject.
Fondation Beyeler, September 18, 2021
Lotte Laserstein's painting entitled Self Portrait with a Cat (1928) may be regarded as exposing a range of information about its creator, even for the casual observer. When creating this realist painting, the German-Swedish artist captured not only a detailed likeness of herself but carefully constructed the work to express much about her stance in life, in addition to her role as an artist.
Laserstein began to be included in many exhibitions, and her work became more widely acknowledged as a result. Her prominent role within the Association of Berlin Women Artists further aided her career. The painter's art was centred on figurative reflections and portraiture in an age of post-expressionism, amidst the growing popularity of a movement known as New Objectivism. The artistic focus was being removed from the emotive outpourings of the previously favoured expressionist painters and had become fixed on an unsentimental realism.
Die lange vergessene Malerin Lotte Laserstein bekommt auch in ihrer ehemaligen Heimatstadt einen Erinnerungsort. An ihrem Wohnhaus im Bayerischen Viertel in Berlin hängt nun eine Gedenktafel für die Kunst-Pionierin der Weimarer Republik
In 1929,
the German daily Berliner Tageblatt featured an art review that alerted
readers: “Lotte Laserstein – a name we need to know.” The works of Laserstein,
then 31 years old, were among those featured at the show under review. “The
artist is one of the best among the young generation of painters. We will have
cause to continue watching her shining ascent,” the newspaper promised.
In the next few years, Laserstein fulfilled some of those expectations. Her paintings were displayed at some 20 exhibitions in the German capital and she also received a number of awards – but due to her Jewish roots on her father’s side, her promising career was cut short with the rise of the Nazi regime in 1933.
After her work was barred from being shown, Laserstein fled to Sweden where she continued to paint, although she had difficulty replicating her budding career as an artist there. She died in Kalmar, Sweden in 1993. It was only in the latter years of her life that there was a revived interest in the work of the woman who had showed such promise in the waning years of Germany’s Weimar Republic.
“Face to Face,” now on at the Berlinsche Galerie museum of modern art through August 12, is an impressive, comprehensive exhibition of Laserstein’s paintings, curated by Annelie Lütgens. It brings the artist’s work back to the city where her career first blossomed – a city whose residents during that era feature in many of her paintings.
Acclaimed by the German media, “Face to Face” challenges viewers because it’s difficult to define Laserstein’s work as belonging to any discrete aesthetic category. The paintings on show are from the interwar period, when the artistic landscape in Germany was characterized by a multiplicity of avant-garde styles and trends. Laserstein excelled particularly in her warm and empathetic portraits, many of which featured modern, liberated women, but even when addressing innovative ideas in her paintings, she maintained a meticulous realistic style that was unusual in her day.
The prime example of this is her best-known painting, a large work from 1930 entitled “Evening Over Potsdam,” portraying five people deep in thought, sitting around with a table on a rooftop terrace, with a dog. In the background is the city skyline at twilight, overshadowed by dark clouds. Despite its realistic style – and the fact that it is somewhat reminiscent of Da Vinci’s “Last Supper” and Johannes Vermeer’s “The Milkmaid” – the painting conveys an aura of unease and sorrow, which appears to be an accurate reflection of the era in which it was created, in the late 1920s, when economic and political crises shook Germany and ultimately led to the rise of Nazism.
“Evening Over Potsdam” and a good number of other paintings by Laserstein are proof that the artistic spectrum during the Weimar years was broader than generally thought, says German art historian Dr. Anna-Carola Krausse. About 15 years ago Krausse produced a groundbreaking, comprehensive study of Laserstein’s work and curated an exhibit of her work that marked the beginning of renewed interest in the artist, in Germany.
In the next few years, Laserstein fulfilled some of those expectations. Her paintings were displayed at some 20 exhibitions in the German capital and she also received a number of awards – but due to her Jewish roots on her father’s side, her promising career was cut short with the rise of the Nazi regime in 1933.
After her work was barred from being shown, Laserstein fled to Sweden where she continued to paint, although she had difficulty replicating her budding career as an artist there. She died in Kalmar, Sweden in 1993. It was only in the latter years of her life that there was a revived interest in the work of the woman who had showed such promise in the waning years of Germany’s Weimar Republic.
“Face to Face,” now on at the Berlinsche Galerie museum of modern art through August 12, is an impressive, comprehensive exhibition of Laserstein’s paintings, curated by Annelie Lütgens. It brings the artist’s work back to the city where her career first blossomed – a city whose residents during that era feature in many of her paintings.
Acclaimed by the German media, “Face to Face” challenges viewers because it’s difficult to define Laserstein’s work as belonging to any discrete aesthetic category. The paintings on show are from the interwar period, when the artistic landscape in Germany was characterized by a multiplicity of avant-garde styles and trends. Laserstein excelled particularly in her warm and empathetic portraits, many of which featured modern, liberated women, but even when addressing innovative ideas in her paintings, she maintained a meticulous realistic style that was unusual in her day.
The prime example of this is her best-known painting, a large work from 1930 entitled “Evening Over Potsdam,” portraying five people deep in thought, sitting around with a table on a rooftop terrace, with a dog. In the background is the city skyline at twilight, overshadowed by dark clouds. Despite its realistic style – and the fact that it is somewhat reminiscent of Da Vinci’s “Last Supper” and Johannes Vermeer’s “The Milkmaid” – the painting conveys an aura of unease and sorrow, which appears to be an accurate reflection of the era in which it was created, in the late 1920s, when economic and political crises shook Germany and ultimately led to the rise of Nazism.
“Evening Over Potsdam” and a good number of other paintings by Laserstein are proof that the artistic spectrum during the Weimar years was broader than generally thought, says German art historian Dr. Anna-Carola Krausse. About 15 years ago Krausse produced a groundbreaking, comprehensive study of Laserstein’s work and curated an exhibit of her work that marked the beginning of renewed interest in the artist, in Germany.
Laserstein combined the 19th-century academic style in which she was trained with contemporary subjects, says Krausee, thereby allowing us to expand the significance of the concept of artistic modernism. And although her work was undoubtedly modern, it also shows how figurative and not just abstract painting can capture the spirit of an era.
The Berlinische Galerie show features about 60 of Laserstein’s works, most from the early years of her career in Berlin, although some are from her time in exile in Sweden. Also on display are the palette she used, as well as photographs and documents that offer insight into her life.
Discovering Rose
Lotte Laserstein was born in a small town in East Prussia in 1898; her mother who was a pianist and a father who was a pharmacist and died when she was very young. She moved with her mother and sister to Danzig (now the Polish city of Gdansk). As a girl, she studied painting with her aunt, who was also an artist.
The family moved to Berlin before World War I, and thereafter Laserstein studied philosophy and art history at the city’s Friedrich Wilhelm University. She was then accepted at the Berlin Art Academy, which had just opened its doors to women a few years beforehand. One of her primary instructors there was the German-Jewish painter Erich Wolfsfeld.
In 1925, by chance, Laserstein met a salesclerk named Traute Rose, whom she asked to be a model for her paintings. The two became close and Rose, who went on to be an actress and singer, features in many of the artist’s works. On more than one occasion, Rose appeared next to the artist in them, and was considered to be an equal partner in the composition – as opposed to the usual artist-model hierarchical perception.
As with other women whom Laserstein painted, Rose fit the image of the “new woman” of the Weimar period, a time when women were gaining increasing independence. Along with the right to vote, they were taking jobs that had been previously seen as men’s work and in some instances, even adopted a male or androgynous appearance.
During a tour of the current show, art historian Krausse draws particular attention to Laserstein’s portraits of women, including “Tennis Player” (1929), depicting a sport that was becoming popular at the time in Germany; “Girl Lying on Blue” (1931), which was selected as the exhibition poster; and “Self-Portrait with a Cat” (1928), in which the artist sought to demonstrate her professional capabilities, toying with the tradition of self-portraiture, according to Krausse.
In the painting the cat represents femininity and the artist is dressed like a man and has a man’s haircut. The viewer will note that the canvas near her in the painting is blank: It’s the painting that she is about to create, while still sitting and peering into the mirror. Here, as with other works, Laserstein was trying to understand perspective, allowing us to see together with her rather than seeing through her, says Krausse.
Not a ‘party girl’
Another major work from Laserstein’s early years is “Russian Girl with Compact” (1928), which depicts a young woman from Russian émigré circles in Berlin – which didn’t keep Laserstein from winning a prize in a competition of portraits of German women, sponsored by a cosmetics firm. The way in which the artists presented the émigrée as a young, up-to-date urban woman who is meticulous about her appearance, suited the growing discourse at the time about the importance of fashion and grooming in exhibitionist Western society.
Krausse stresses that, “In Laserstein’s portraits of women, as opposed to portraits created by male artists of the time, the model is not perceived as an object, but rather as a subject. She presents them as women with natural self-confidence, without provocations or eroticism, and also without a perception of ‘sweet’ femininity, as can be found in other female painters of the time. There is no difference in the way she paints men and women.”
An example of this is one of her important paintings, “In the Tavern” (1927), which portrays two women, each sitting alone in a café. The painting, which is not included in the present exhibition, was originally acquired by the Berlin municipality and later confiscated by the Nazis, who described it as “degenerate art.”
That work is also exceptional among Laserstein’s oeuvre because it focuses on the new and vibrant urban culture of the early 20th century – a subject that preoccupied many artists during her time but for the most part did not arouse her curiosity. Krausse explains that Laserstein was not involved in the Bohemian cultural scene in Weimar Berlin.
“She wasn’t a ‘party girl’ and didn’t spend time with the great artists of the period at the Romanisches Café or other places in the city where they would go,” says the historian. “Moreover, avant-garde was not her natural milieu, and when she began her independent career in the late 1920s, Expressionism, Dada and Surrealism were in any case no longer in vogue. She worked parallel to the artists of the New Objectivity movement, including Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz and Christian Schad, and she really resembles some of them in her post-Expressionist style and her return to naturalistic painting. But as opposed to them, her work does not contain scathing political and social criticism.”
During her most productive years Laserstein received a prize from the Prussian Ministry of Art, joined the association of women artists in Berlin and had a solo exhibition at the highly regarded gallery of Berlin art dealer Fritz Gurlitt. But shortly after Hitler’s government took over, she was banned from participating in shows and her studio was closed.
Laserstein earned a living as an art teacher at a Jewish school in Berlin and in 1937, after being invited to mount an exhibition in Stockholm, took advantage of the opportunity in order to flee, taking a selection of her paintings with her. In Sweden she made a living mainly from selling work on consignment. She tried unsuccessfully to help relatives who remained behind in Germany: Her sister survived in hiding in Berlin during the Holocaust, but their mother was arrested and died in the Ravensbruck concentration camp.
After the war Laserstein visited Germany and renewed her relationship with her friend Rosa, but she never returned to live in the country. She lived in the Swedish city of Kalmar and although she continued to paint and exhibit from time to time, she found it difficult to revive her reputation – both because of her style, which didn’t suit the new trends in European art, and because of her distance from the centers of the European art scene.
Before Laserstein died in 1993, however, she did witness the rediscovery of her work, which began in 1987 with an exhibition in London. It continued with greater momentum after her death and since the beginning of the millennium, her paintings have aroused great curiosity among curators, art scholars and collectors alike. Their prices have also been rising steadily in the past decade: “In the Tavern” was sold at public auction for 110,000 euros, and “Evening over Potsdam” was acquired by the New National Gallery in Berlin for 350,000 pounds sterling (about $435,800).
Among art-lovers in Israel Laserstein is still not very well known – although “Evening Over Potsdam” was one of the prominent works in the German art exhibition “Twilight Over Berlin,” held about four years ago at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The artist and the painting were also represented in a charming literary form in the 2018 Hebrew novel “The Modern Dance” by Michal Sapir, where they come to life in a story inspired by the writings of Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, which takes place in Berlin during the twilight of the Weimar Republic.
“We were guests with a group of friends at an evening meal in the home of painter Lotte … in Potsdam,” writes Sapir, in the voice of the main protagonist, who is looking at the city spread out before his eyes beneath a cloudy and murky sky. “Dora was wearing her sleeveless yellow summer dress. The air breathed heavily in the oppressive heat of late summer. On the table leftover bread from the meal and a few pale apples and pears were scattered. I stood there on the balcony permeated with a feeling of endless exile …
“Lotte poured milk into the coffee cups. Erwin Kraft [another character] still had a half-full glass of beer in his hand … I returned to the table and looked at my friends who were sitting immersed in a soft twilight melancholy, averting their pensive glances from one another. I imagined them, each one of them, replacing their facial expressions with the numbers on the face of an alarm clock, which rang for 60 seconds every minute.”
Work of a Nazi-banished Artist Is Back in Focus in Berlin. By Avner Shapira. Haaretz, July 25, 2019.
‘Face to Face’ is an apt title for this comprehensive survey of the work of Lotte Laserstein (1889–1993). Throughout her life, Laserstein was preoccupied with the enigma and confrontation of the returned stare, her own emerging as the most constant and profound of all. It is the portraits, specifically the self-portraits in which Laserstein’s dark eyes look back at us under hooded lids, with an almost haughty upward tilt of her top lip, that make an indelible impression. A ‘face-to-face’ suggests a deeper level of communication and, with this on offer, we have an obligation to return the gaze squarely, with eyes and mind open.
The vivid portraits of the new women and modern men of the Weimar Era for which she is celebrated are carefully complemented in this show (which has travelled from the Städel Museum) with landscapes and later works made after Laserstein emigrated to Sweden in 1937. If these works lack the edge of those from the Berlin years, they reflect how, in enduring the mental schism of forced exile, her relationship to her talent became complicated. She took on commissions to earn a living, but in 1946 felt ‘wretched that after nine years in Sweden one is no further on than at the beginning’. Gothenburg Harbour (1943), a nocturne drawing inspiration from Old Masters as much as lens-based innovations of the age, enriches our understanding of what Laserstein could do with paint, but the later works also question the idea that suffering begets ‘great art’. Classified ‘three quarters Jewish’ under the Nazi dictatorship, Laserstein had been banned from participating in German cultural life after 1933. In 1943, she learned that her mother had been murdered at Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Laserstein’s bravura skill as a draughtswoman reaches its peak in her masterpiece Evening Over Potsdam (1930). Here, the looming political nightmare seems to descend over a group of weary moderns engaged in a secular version of The Last Supper. This skill was, perhaps, a sort of albatross in the era of the ‘New Objectivity’, with contemporaries such as Christian Schad and Jeanne Mammen pursuing a more obviously avant-garde agenda. But how might she have warped her line to greater effect? What did it mean to possess such pure illustrative technique, when everything about your identity could be deemed ‘warped’?
The exhibition texts avoid comment on Laserstein’s sexuality, erring towards the idea that ‘if anything, it is painting itself that comes across as the erotic act for Laserstein’. As a queer viewer, it is not that you demand an absolute position on the artist’s sexuality, rather that the conversation shouldn’t always lean towards a heteronormative viewpoint; one that regularly assumes the potential sexual relationship between a male artist and his muse, but ignores or neutralises what is on display here. Laserstein’s portraits of her ‘friend’ Traute Rose are laced with same-sex intimacy. It is widely agreed that Laserstein’s great power is her ability to communicate psychological states between characters or, indeed, the characters and ourselves. It therefore seems odd, blind even, to turn away from Laserstein’s sexuality.
In I and my Model (1929/30), the artist works at her easel, her face turned to confront the viewer, her eyebrows arched knowingly. Traute, not classically nude, but in a domestic state of undress, observes close behind, her hand on Laserstein’s shoulder where a patch of light beneath electrifies the gesture. It is a radical take on the gendered power-play of the artist and model, feminist in its depiction of care and interdependence, while glinting with delight and provocation. Its erotic charge is picked up in a series of quick, tender sketches of Traute sleeping naked in bed, executed on pages from a small sketchpad that might have been kept by the bedside and reached for upon waking. In the At the Mirror (1930/31), the naked Traute grapples with a mirror. Her back is to the viewer, so that her reflected stare is the only clearly visible face in a composition that hints at The Three Graces. Traute meets her own determined, sensual expression as Laserstein stands braced in front of her easel in a dingy workman’s coat, energetically squeezing paint on to her palette. Traute, the mirror, and the edge of Laserstein’s canvas as it slices back into the picture plane, are luminous elements in the painting, framing Laserstein, as she so often depicted herself, at work.
Is it time to take Lotte Laserstein at face value? By Phoebe Blatton. Apollo Magazine, June 20, 2019.
Emily
May speaks to the curator of Face to Face, a retrospective on the work of the
portrait painter Lotte Laserstein.
“The
Golden Twenties” hold a special allure for many people. During this time cities
all around the world were overcome with raucous parties and artistic
innovation, but none as much as Berlin. Funded by American loans, and under the
leadership of the newly formed democratic Weimar Republic, the post-war German
capital enjoyed a new era of decadent nightlife and nurtured the beginning of a
plethora of decade-defining artistic movements, all whilst living in the shadow
of political turmoil and the horrors that were yet to come. 100 years since the
Weimar Republic was formed, and with the centenary of the beginning of this
culturally rich decade a year away, it is unsurprising that there are a
plethora of exhibitions and events paying homage to the artists who made the
roaring twenties so special.
One such
exhibition is Face to Face, an upcoming retrospective at the Berlinische
Gallery (produced in collaboration with the Städel Museum, Frankfurt) which
explores the work of the portrait painter Lotte Laserstein. Opening on 5th
April and running through to 8th December 2019, Face to Face will shine a light
on a largely forgotten Weimar artist. We spoke to the exhibition’s curator,
Annelie Lütgens ahead of the opening to find out more about why Laserstein, and
female painters and thinkers in general, are enjoying new-found attention in
2019.
“I
[first] became interested in the art of the Weimar Republic during my studies
in the late 1970s, when contemporary art turned [towards] realism and a
critical view towards… society” says Lütgens, who is the head of the department
of prints and drawings at the Berlinische Gallery. “Out of this I discovered
women artists of the twenties and started to make research” she continues,
saying that she is not only inspired by painters and drafts people, but also
women writers of the period such as Irmgard Keun, Djuna Barnes, and Annemarie
Schwarzenbach. “All these people tried out, suffered, and finally made their
own independent lives as women and artists” says Lütgens. “They are… models still for today.”
The
paintings of Lotte Laserstein capture the emergence of such strong female
personalities. Whilst she depicted subjects from all areas of society, she is
particularly renowned for her portrayal of the newly liberated women of the
era. “The New Woman, as she was known in the 1920s, wore practical clothes and
cut her hair short” Lütgens describes. “Lotte Laserstein repeatedly returns to
this contemporary type [in her painting] and she also embodied it herself” she
continues. “In her self-portraits, Lotte Laserstein reflects visually on her identity
as an artist and as a woman. Like many artists, she uses the genre to convey
how she sees and wishes to be seen.”
Laserstein’s
status as a “New Woman” herself give a different feel to her work in comparison
to that of contemporary portrait painters such as George Grosz and Otto Dix,
the latter of whom also depicted famous women from Weimar society, such as the
cabaret dancer Anita Berber and the journalist Sylvia von Harden. Lütgens cites
Laserstein’s double portraits of herself and her sitter Traute Rose as perfect
examples of how the artist’s female gaze sets her apart from her male
contemporaries. “These intimate double portraits challenge the conventional
motif of male artist and muse, replacing the traditional hierarchy with
sympathetic collaboration,” she says, stating that “Laserstein depicts the
painter and sitter as equal partners.”
Despite
the innovative nature of Laserstein’s work, her name is less familiar to the
public than those of Dix and Grosz, who are consistently prominent in
exhibitions about the period. Take the recent Aftermath: Art and War in the
Wake of World War One display at London’s Tate Modern as an example, which
focused largely on male artists. “The rediscovering of women from the Weimar
period started later [than that of] painters like Dix and Grosz” Lügtens
laments, yet she does admit that even “they too were forgotten in the first
decades after World War Two when abstract art was the favorite style.” Although
there has been a rise in the number of retrospectives in the past few years to
shine light on the work of forgotten female Weimar artists, Lütgens asserts
that “women painters should be part of exhibitions as a matter of cause.”
One such
recent female-focused retrospective was Jeanne Mammen: The Observer, which was
also curated by Lütgens, and came to the Berlinische almost exactly one year
before Face to Face. Whilst one might think that Mammen and Laserstein’s works
are very similar, due to their joint focus on the archetype of “the New Woman”
and the fact that they pursued “an independent artistic life without being part
of a married couple or having children”, Lütgens informs us that there are in
fact many points of contrast between their artistic styles. “Jeanne Mammen
trained as an artist in France and Belgium,” say Lütgens. “She had another
background as – you could say – a European big city girl, and she had a
left-wing political opinion. She was more of a draftsperson than a pure
painter, even in her paintings of the Twenties. Mammen’s style is based on
French art, like [that of] Toulouse Lautrec or Steinlen” she continues.
Conversely, “Laserstein’s painting is based on German art of the late 19th
Century, which is more traditional” Lütgens explains, citing artists Max
Liebermann, Wilhelm Leibl and Karl Schuch as influences on her work. But
despite these conservative beginnings, Laserstein’s approach did transform over
time. “[Her] way of painting became more open in the 1930s. She developed a
sensual painterly style which could be compared for example to the French
painter Emile Bonnard.”
Lotte
Laserstein was a rising star of Weimar Berlin, forced to leave her country and
abandon her artistic aspirations, but with this exhibition of highlights from
her peak, there is hope that her name may yet not be forgotten
Face to
face. An appropriate title for an exhibition so largely comprised of portraits
– among them a large proportion of self-portraits. For, surrounded by these
canvases of Lotte Laserstein (1898-1993), one feels beset by myriad pairs of
eyes. She is usually categorised as an artist of Neue Sachlichkeit (New
Objectivity), alongside her male contemporaries Otto Dix, George Grosz and
Christian Schad, but her style is really quite different from theirs – devoid
of political satire and containing far more empathy, intimacy, and, dare I say
it at the risk of sounding disingenuous, femininity.
Laserstein
grew up in a very female environment, with her mother, her sister, Käte, and
her aunt and grandmother, following the death of her father in 1902.
Fortunately, there was enough family money for both daughters to study and
Laserstein was one of the first generation of women accepted into the Berlin
Art Academy, in 1921 – two large charcoal drawings of male nudes evidence that
she also attended life classes while there. Bear in mind that she was painting
at the same time as, for example, the artists of the expressionist group, Die
Brücke, and her style might seem a little old fashioned and venerating of art
history – “more academy than avant garde”, as Kolja Reichert wrote in the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (23 September 2018). One hypothesis put
forward by the exhibition texts is that, belonging to this first generation of
educated female artists, she lacked the rebellious streak of many of her male
contemporaries, wishing instead to prove her technical ability. Vermeer, for
example, was one artist she openly declared to be a great influence on her, and
aspects of the Dutch master’s style can be detected, especially, perhaps, in
her choice of palette.
Nevertheless,
Laserstein was not prosaic in her choice of subject, frequently depicting the
“new woman”, androgynous and with short-cropped hair. Her close friend and
favourite muse, Gertrud Rose, known as Traute, who modelled for 90% of
Laserstein’s nudes, embodies this “type”. There has been repeated speculation
over a lesbian relationship between the two women, but this seems, on the
whole, to be unfounded – as well as somewhat irrelevant and an example of our
contemporary classifications muddying those of the past. Not only was Traute
happily married, but Laserstein’s sister, Käte, was in an openly lesbian
relationship, so it seems unlikely that Laserstein should have remained in the
closet, were this the case.
