Lotte Laserstein : A Name We Need To Know.

 

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.

 
The self-portrait was intended, of course, as a form of representation to project meaning on character, identity and status. For women particularly, creating images of themselves in the genre of painting has been a historically arduous task, as gendered assumptions and cultural limitations had to be ingeniously surmounted.
 
Yet, in her self-portrait Laserstein boldly confronts expectations. While both capturing and captivating the viewer with her direct gaze, her portrait was not a simple echo of the self but offered a challenge to perceptions of both 'the female artist' and womanhood itself. The work, in turn, was indicative of Laserstein's approach to the expression of her art and in her life more generally.
 
Born in Preussich-Holland in Prussia during 1898 into a family of part Jewish heritage, Laserstein lost her father at the age of just four years old. The death caused the family to relocate into the home of the artist's maternal grandmother. Here Laserstein's mother was known to paint ceramics and it can be presumed the young Lotte was influenced by such artistic endeavours.
 
After the family moved again in later years to Berlin, Laserstein began her adult education in such areas as the history of art and philosophy, while also taking lessons in painting. Her entrance into the city's College of Fine Arts during 1921 was a bold move for the young artist in the first years of the school allowing entrance to female students. Her later completion of studies at the United State School of Liberal and Applied Art enabled Laserstein an excellent foundation for a career in art. The economic woes of the country in an era of high inflation, however, took a toll on the family's finances and the young artist was forced to work in such areas as industrial design.
 
Nevertheless, Laserstein's promise in her chosen field of fine art was soon recognised by the school, who viewed her work as amongst the best at the academy and she was honoured by the Prussian Ministry of Science, Art and Education. Opening her own art studio in 1927 while supporting herself by giving painting lessons, the artist soon began creating her work in earnest. It was here, in the following year, that Laserstein created her self-portrait with the addition of her feline companion.
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.
 
The realistic work Laserstein produced during the late 1920s and early 1930s, often featuring her favoured female models, certainly caught the mood of the age. This era known as the Weimar Republic, encompassed a German renaissance in cultural terms despite the economic and political turmoil, as the Berlin bars bustled with artists and intellectuals within a flourishing bohemian scene.

 
Laserstein's portraits reflected not only the lives surrounding her but also the mood of the era. The painting Woman in a Café, a commission featuring the wife of a well-known lawyer, presents the subject as a fashionably attired woman of the age. The seated figure is featured alone with her cocktail, indicative of the growing independent spirit of women and is posed confidently as she leans forward to engage with the world she inhabits.
 
Another of Laserstein's paintings, The Yellow Parasol (1935), is reflective of a looser painting style for the artist and presents a young woman holding the object of the title. While a common theme in Western art since the nineteenth century, Laserstein added a twist to the familiar formula which avoids the contrived depictions of femininity common in the work of artists such as Renoir.
 
Here Laserstein presents her female subject as rather androgynously dressed, thus countering the cliches of the theme. This was an age of daring exploration after all, in which French artist Claude Cahun was toying with ideas of gender and German-born actress Marlene Dietrich was kissing women on screen dressed in a tuxedo. The model who posed for Laserstein's painting was known as Traute Rose, a close friend of the artist who featured in many of her artworks and played a significant role in the painter's life.
 
Despite her increasing achievements with each new show and painting, Laserstein's artistic career was soon to be interrupted. The rise of Nazi anti-Semitism created a toxic atmosphere in which artists of Jewish heritage, like Laserstein, were excluded from exhibiting. Unable to purchase art materials easily and discharged from her role in art associations, the painter was forced to develop a plan of escape. In order to leave her homeland, emigrate to Sweden and gain citizenship, Laserstein married a Swedish man. However, she did not cohabit with her new husband and set up a new life independently in Stockholm.
 
Her efforts to save her mother, who remained in Germany, tragically failed and Meta Laserstein died at the hands of Hitler's regime in Ravensbrück concentration camp. The painter's loyal friend Traute, however, did manage to smuggle Laserstein's artworks out of Germany, avoiding their theft or destruction under Nazi rule. Living out her life in the Swedish capital, here Laserstein joined the Swedish Academy of Arts and continued to work particularly in the field of portraiture.
 
Understanding Laserstein's view of herself and her work is enabled by revisiting her Self Portrait with a Cat to decipher the codes instilled within oil on canvas. The significance of the setting is particularly relevant. The artist's studio, communicated by the centrality of the painter's tools in the background, connects the figure to her work and creativity. Meanwhile, the easel, canvas and hovering paintbrush in hand all highlight the act of painting as Laserstein flaunts her professional abilities to the viewer. The subject is reflected in suitable attire for the job, reflective of a practical approach to her work which purposely ignores gendered conventions on female appearance. In addition, the subject's hair is short, and she wears no make-up, or indeed, any sign of expected feminine costume. While enjoying the soft textures of the cotton overall and feline fur, the painter presents herself as particularly rigid and her gaze is strong, while her slightly raised eyebrow seems to question the viewer's assumptions.
 
Undoubtedly painted while looking into a mirror, the painter conveys an assured self-reflection buoyed by her burgeoning success. Also, by utilising a pose reminiscent of the self-aggrandising statements of male painters throughout history, Laserstein makes a carefully considered declaration of her own.

 
As is the case for so many women in the arts, Laserstein's work generally went into relative post-war obscurity and was only rediscovered in the last years of her life. An exhibition of her work was held in the late 1980s which showcased many of her paintings to a new generation. This included work featuring her notable male subjects also, such as Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Sir Ernst Chain in a 1945 portrait conveyed in Laserstein's typical realist style. The exhibition was attended by both the artist and her ever-present muse Traute, who appeared in many intimate artworks by the artist.
 
Laserstein died in 1993 as her paintings were finally receiving the international recognition they deserved. Her legacy, in turn, is one of presenting the world with a beguiling body of work which encompasses an obvious understanding of her subjects, perhaps no more so than in the portrait with a fearless female gaze.
 
Lotte Laserstein: the German realist who challenged expectations. By P.L. Henderson. Art UK , February 15, 2021.

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 Berlin erinnert jetzt eine Gedenktafel an die deutsch-schwedische Malerin Lotte Laserstein (1898-1993), die für viele Menschen eine der großen Kunst-Wiederentdeckungen der vergangenen Jahre ist. Die Tafel wurde in dieser Woche an ihrem ehemaligen Wohnhaus in der Jenaer Straße 3 im Stadtteil Wilmersdorf angebracht, wie die Senatsverwaltung für Kultur mitteilte. Eine feierliche Enthüllung gab es wegen der Corona-Pandemie nicht.
 
Laserstein-Ausstellungen waren kürzlich in der Berlinischen Galerie und im Städel Museum in Frankfurt/Main zu sehen. Die Malerin gilt heute als eine der wichtigsten Künstlerinnen der Weimarer Republik. Sie war eine der ersten Frauen, die in den 20er-Jahren an der Kunstakademie in Berlin studierte und 1937 vor den Nationalsozialisten nach Schweden floh, wo sie eine Malschule gründete. Lotte Laserstein war zu Lebzeiten durchaus bekannt und erfolgreich, vor allem mit ihren sinnlichen Darstellungen von selbstbewussten Frauen. Erst mit den Ausstellungen der vergangenen Jahre wurde jedoch ihre Rolle in der Kunstgeschichte angemessen gewürdigt und ihr Werk einem größeren Publikum bekannt. Inzwischen befinden sich zwei wichtige Werke in Sammlungen ihrer ehemaligen Heimatstadt Berlin. Die Berlinische Galerie kaufte 2019 das Porträt "Dame mit roter Baskenmütze" von ca. 1931, das monumentale Gemälde "Abend über Potsdam" gehört der Neuen Nationalgalerie.
 
Gedenktafel für Lotte Laserstein,  Späte Ehre. Monopol Magazin, June 25, 2020.

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.

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.”

 
The development of Laserstein’s style could be seen as a result of her to her move to Stockholm from Berlin in 1937, where she sought refuge from the Nazi party who had forbidden her to participate in public cultural life in Germany due to her Jewish heritage. This change of artistic base also provides another point of comparison between Laserstein and Mammen. “While Mammen did not emigrate and developed her art of resistance in Berlin, Laserstein had to leave her boundaries, and because of that… struggled for her artistic identity” asserts Lütgens. Upon first moving to Sweden, “her portraits of elegant women… seem to pick up where they left off in Berlin. But as time passed, she found the pressure to earn a living from commissioned portraits wearisome and not very inspiring” the exhibition curator informs us. “She seized every opportunity to tackle new artistic challenges including murals for private and public buildings, [but] her struggle to cater for prevailing tastes in art without giving rein to her true talents plunged her into deep resignation”.
 
The Face to Face exhibition in Berlin will feature artwork from both the artists’ Berlin and Swedish periods to allow comparison, and perhaps to make people wonder how the painter’s style would have developed if her unfortunate position as a person of Jewish heritage in 1930s Berlin had not diverted her course. Whilst Lütgens states that she cannot imagine how Laserstein’s artistic career would have developed if she had been able to stay in Berlin, she does posit that “her traditional style of painting could have been favorable in the Nazi era, but her images of women would definitely not.”
 
It’s a feeling that can’t be more removed from today when images of strong women from history are celebrated in the market. Take the rediscovery of Renaissance artist Artemisia Gentileschi for example, whose paintings of strong, powerful women attracted waves of market interest, so much so that her Lucretia sold for more than double its high estimate last October, realizing €1.88 million ($2 million). Lütgens seems confident that Face to Face will receive a positive reception. “I hope people will take away moments of happy awareness having been introduced to one of the most gifted artists of the Weimar era” she states. “I am sure the audience will love Lotte Laserstein’s work.”

 
 
The Exhibition Rediscovering One of the Weimar Era's 'Most Gifted Artists'. By Emily May. Mutual Art, March 25, 2019.

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.

 
As well as paintings of Traute, there are, as mentioned, a great number of self-portraits on display, as well as paintings in which Laserstein appears in the background, frequently wearing her painting shirt, as a kind of attribute. For example, In meinem Atelier (In my Studio) (1928) depicts Traute in a classical reclining Venus pose, set against the snowy rooftops of Wilmersdorf, Berlin. Between the foreground and background, the artist is present, standing – and working – at her easel. This is, in fact, an impossible composition, since, from the position in which Laserstein is standing, Traute would have had to appear in reverse. Additionally, while the painting itself is oil on board, in the picture, Laserstein is painting on canvas. Still, who is to deny a little artistic licence?
 
  
This mirroring is, in fact, something Laserstein plays with in a number of her works, including also a later self-portrait in which she stands – somewhat poignantly, as will soon become clear – before her masterpiece Abend über Potsdam (Evening over Potsdam) (1930). In this example with Venus, however, the artist’s presence acts further to prevent the viewer from laying claim in his or her mind to the passive female (albeit androgynous) nude – since she is already “possessed”. By “possessed”, however, I don’t mean to suggest any sense of hierarchy or object-subject relationship – there is far more a sense of equality between the artist and her model, as also captured in Zwei Mädchen (Two Girls) (1927), which, with its close crop and studious but young and carefree poses, is my favourite work in the show.
 
Laserstein worked mainly with four basic sets of green-brown colours, and painted alla prima, largely with just one layer. Nevertheless, she was able to successfully create a convincing illusion of different materials, including, for example, leather and metal in Der Motorradfahrer (The Motorcyclist) (1929).
 
The hypnotic Russisches Mädchen mit Puderdose (Russian Girl with Compact) (1928), with its luxuriously rich crimson red, was one of the 25 finalists in a competition run by the cosmetics company Elida to find the most beautiful portrait of a woman in 1928. The model was the daughter of Laserstein’s Russian lodgers. In fact, she found many models among Russian exiles, following the 1917 revolution. This work and the later Junge mit Kasper-Puppe (Wolfgang Karger) (Boy with Kasper Puppet (Wolfgang Karger)) (1933) were both recently acquired by the Städel Museum, and it was around these that this long overdue exhibition was conceived.

 
This is the first time in Germany – outside Berlin – that Laserstein has been recognised with a proper retrospective. This comes as little surprise, however, given that she emigrated to Sweden in 1937, having been forbidden to work or exhibit in her own country, following the introduction of the Nuremberg race laws in 1935. Although a baptised Protestant, Laserstein had three Jewish grandparents, and was accordingly declared “three-quarter Jew” by the authorities when she turned to them for help. Cleverly – and luckily – Laserstein organised an exhibition in Stockholm, comprising much of her work, and, travelling there to “take it down”, simply stayed. Six months later, she married a Swede, so as to obtain citizenship, and she never returned to Berlin.
 
This exhibition comprises 40 paintings and drawings, primarily from the Weimar period of the late-20s and early 30s. Laserstein’s life’s work as a whole comprises about 10,000 pieces, but many of these – with examples being the somewhat kitsch portraits of children on white backgrounds on display in the final space – were produced for clients in Sweden so as to earn a living, and weren’t what she would have wanted to be producing, either in terms of style or subject matter. “I can’t develop any further artistically,” she declared during this period. Accordingly – and, I believe, rightly – the curators have chosen to largely overlook these later works, excepting a few self-portraits, painted purely for herself, and thus enabling some element of continued experimentation.
 
Laserstein’s key work is generally considered to be Abend über Potsdam (Evening over Potsdam) (1930), which has been likened by one of the curators, Elena Schroll, to a depiction of the Last Supper. Certainly there is a sense of impending depression (this was painted, quite literally, on the eve of the Depression), and the excitement of the “roaring 20s” has been replaced by an overt sense of melancholy. The five friends (painted after real-life friends of the artist, with Traute on the left-hand side – although the woman on the right, less of a patient model, actually has the legs of Traute beneath her own head and torso, and the dog, the least patient model of them all, was largely painted from a fur Laserstein had in her studio) seem no longer to know what to say to one another.

 
The logistics of producing the work were impressive, not just in terms of improvisation and problem-solving when it came to the models, but the one-metre-high by two-metres-wide canvas was transported by S-Bahn (overground train) from Berlin to a friend’s house with a roof terrace in Potsdam, and then back again to Berlin to be finished in Laserstein’s studio. Deservedly, that same year, Das Berliner Tageblatt declared: “Lotte Laserstein – this is a name to watch. The artist is one of the very best of the young generation of painters, her glittering path to success will be one to follow!”1 Schroll similarly describes Laserstein as a “rising star”, but she was sadly a rising star who had to flee her homeland and abandon her achievements long before reaching her zenith. With this presentation of highlights from her peak, there is hope that she might yet not be forgotten.
 
Lotte Laserstein : Face to Face. By Anna McNay. Studio International, November 19, 2018.