Lotte Laserstein

German Swedish painter

Lotte Laserstein (28 November 1898 – 21 January 1993) was a German Swedish painter. She was an artist of figurative paintings in Germany's Weimar Republic. The National Socialist regime and its anti Semitism forced her to leave Germany in 1937 and to emigrate to Sweden. In Sweden, she continued to work as a portraitist and painter of landscapes until her death. The paintings she created during the 1920s and 1930s fit into the movement of New Objectivity in Germany.

Laserstein was born in Preussisch Holland, German Empire in 1898. Her father, Hugo, was a pharmacist, and her mother, Meta, was a pianist, piano teacher, and a porcelain painter. Christened as a child, she grew up in an assimilated German Jewish household. Laserstein favored female models and the representation of female lifeworlds blended "social representation with painterly presence". Laserstein painted cadavers to illustrate text books to obtain money during the period of hyperinflation. During the Nazi period in Germany, Laserstein emigrated to Sweden, where she stayed in Stockholm and the city of Kalmar. It has been suggested that this move contributed to her legacy falling in obscurity in Germany. She died there on January 21, 1993.

Her most famous paintings, including Die Tennisspielerin (The Tennis Player, 1929), contributed to the verism of New Objectivity movement but also showed continuity with German Naturalism. Laserstein's masterpiece was the large (about 7– 8 feet wide) 1930 painting Abend über Potsdam (Evening over Potsdam), a frieze of friends sharing a meal on their terrace, with Potsdam's skyline arrayed in the far distance. The painting was so large that it required the cooperation of multiple friends to transport it.

Laserstein was rediscovered in Germany in 1987, when Thomas Agnew & Sons and the Belgrave Gallery organized a joint exhibition and sale of works from her personal collection, including Abend über Potsdam, which is now in the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Laserstein attended the exhibition together with her close friend and model of many decades, Traute (Gertrud) Rose. In 1993, the first retrospective of Laserstein's work occurred in Kalmar, Sweden, to which she donated some of her paintings. In 2003, the first comprehensive retrospective of Laserstein's oeuvre was held in Berlin at the Verborgene Museum. In depth research was carried out by Anna Carola Krausse which was synthesized in the exhibition catalogue, Lotte Laserstein: My Only Reality. 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 main part of the estate covers Laserstein's time in Sweden; hardly any documents have survived from the Berlin period.