Lotte Laserstein’s artistic career began in Berlin in the 1920s. After she graduated from the Berlin Art Academy in 1927 – as one of the first women – she quickly managed to make a name for herself on the city’s art scene. With personal studio scenes and portraits of urban, emancipated women, Laserstein captured a zeitgeist. At first glance, her work shares features with the “New objectivity” style. But Laserstein did not exaggerate or caricature – in her work there is instead an intimate realism that interweaves painting tradition with modern themes. The paintings created in Berlin, in which Laserstein portrays her role as an artist and shows the many sides of the Weimar Republic’s modern “new woman” – turn out to be strangely topical, especially against the background of ongoing discussions around gender and queerness.
The success that German art critics predicted and attributed to Lotte Laserstein in the 1920s came to an abrupt end in 1933, with the rise of the Nazis. As a Jewess, Laserstein was increasingly excluded from public art life. Thanks to an invitation to an exhibition from the Galerie Moderne in Stockholm, in 1937 she managed to bring herself and some of her most important works to Sweden, where she would spend most of her professional life. In Sweden, Lotte Laserstein was able to create a new life for herself as a portrait and landscape painter.
– During five decades, Laserstein produced an extremely comprehensive, thematically and stylistically diverse collection of works, which were therefore only partially highlighted in previous presentations, state the exhibition’s curators Iris Müller-Westermann and Anna-Carola Krausse. And continues:
– In our exhibition, this period of Laserstein’s life and work is given the same status as the time in Berlin. Through Laserstein’s representative commissioned portraits, expressive self-portraits, touching depictions of other emigrants as well as landscapes and cityscapes, it is possible to trace the conditions of exile. Laserstein’s Swedish production raises questions about what it means to have lost one’s own cultural and social environment and to have to seek a foothold in a new society. Against the background of our contemporary global migration movements, Laserstein’s work, which was created in Swedish exile, becomes an important contribution to dialogue around these issues.
Although Laserstein managed to execute many important commissioned portraits – her clients included well-known personalities in the aristocracy as well as in politics, business and culture – and although she was still able to make a living from her art, Laserstein’s recognition on the Swedish art scene remained limited. Her consistent adherence to realism during the post-war decades’ dominance of artistic abstraction probably contributed to her not having a major breakthrough in Sweden.
