KunstenaarGerman-Swedish
Lotte Laserstein
0 actieve items
Lotte Laserstein was born on 28 November 1898 in Preussisch-Holland, a small Prussian town that is now Paslek in northern Poland. Her father, a pharmacist, died when she was young, and she and her sister Käte were raised by their mother and extended family. She belonged to the first generation of women who gained access to German art academies after women's suffrage was introduced in 1919, and she used that access to exceptional effect. Beginning her studies at the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts in 1921 under painter Erich Wolfsfeld, she won the Academy's Gold Medal in 1925 and, after leaving in 1927, established her own studio in the city.
The six years between her graduation and the Nazi seizure of power produced what most critics consider the core of her achievement. Working in a mode that sat at the edge of Neue Sachlichkeit - New Objectivity - without adopting its characteristic coolness or social satire, she produced large-format paintings of women's daily lives with a quality of attention that felt almost forensic. Her principal model from 1925 onwards was Traute Rose, a friendship that lasted nearly fifty years and produced some of her most compelling work. In My Studio (1928) and At the Mirror (1930) use the device of the double reflection to collapse the hierarchy between painter and model; Laserstein appears in many of these pictures, measuring herself against her subject rather than mastering it. Her opus magnum, Evening over Potsdam (1930), places a group of friends - mostly women - at a terrace table against the dimming skyline, combining social intimacy with a sense of gathering dusk that carries its own symbolic weight.
Anti-Jewish legislation passed in 1933 barred Laserstein from exhibiting or teaching in Germany. She navigated around the restrictions for several years before emigrating to Sweden in 1937, contracting a marriage of convenience to obtain Swedish nationality. Her attempts to bring her mother and sister to safety failed. Her mother was murdered at Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1943; her sister survived but was permanently damaged. These losses mark a clear line through her life and career.
In Sweden - first in Stockholm, later in Kalmar in Småland, where she settled - she continued working steadily, making a living from commissioned portraits, landscapes of the Swedish countryside, and still lifes. The Swedish period produced a large body of work, less formally daring than the Berlin years but consistent in its observational precision. She maintained a long correspondence with Traute Rose, who remained in Germany throughout. Laserstein returned to public attention in 1987 when a joint exhibition at Agnew's and the Belgrave Gallery in London reintroduced her work to an international audience. She attended the opening alongside Rose. A major retrospective in Berlin in 2003 at Das Verborgene Museum followed, and in 2018-2019 the Städel Museum in Frankfurt mounted "Face to Face," a focused exhibition that travelled to the Berlinische Galerie. Moderna Museet presented the most extensive Nordic retrospective, "A Divided Life," in Malmö and Stockholm in 2023-2024. She died in Kalmar on 21 January 1993, at ninety-four.
On the Swedish auction market, Bukowskis Stockholm is by far the primary venue for her work, accounting for roughly half of all recorded lots. The highest price achieved at auction in Scandinavia came in November 2024, when "Polly Tieck" (1929) - a portrait of Berlin cultural journalist Ilse Amalie Ehrenfried - sold at Bukowskis for 4,650,000 SEK against an estimate of 1,000,000-1,200,000 SEK, subsequently acquired by Nationalmuseum. Internationally, Evening over Potsdam sold at Sotheby's London in 2010 for £421,250 and entered the collection of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. On Auctionist, documented results include a mixed-media portrait at 46,000 SEK and a pastel-and-charcoal drawing at 29,000 SEK, with most lots falling in the 15,000-50,000 SEK range.