Partner Traute (Gertrud) Rose
Queer Places:
Immenweg 7, 12169 Berlin, Germany
Lotte
Laserstein (November 28, 1898 – January 21, 1993) was a German-Swedish
painter.[1]
She depicted the ‘New Woman’ and she adopted the appearance of a masculine
look herself, typically with an ‘Eaton bob’, making her look androgynous. In
1934, labelled under new Nazi racial laws as ‘Three quarters Jewish’, Lotte
was barred from exhibiting in public, and in 1935 she was forced to abandon
her studio. Finally, in 1937 she emigrated to Sweden. The majority of women in
German-speaking Europe associated with innovative arts and literature were
married or engaged in significant heterosexual relationships, although few had
children. Some lived unconventionally: Hannah Hoch was bisexual; painter
Elfriede Lohse-Wichtler
was married briefly, then lived highly unconventionally, including a period
with Gypsies and, reputedly, female partners. No well-known writer lived
openly as a lesbian. Gertrud Kolmar,
Annette Kolb,
Jeanne Mammen,
Milly
Steger, Lotte Laserstein, and
Nelly
Sachs never married.
In Sweden, she continued to work as a portraitist and painter of landscapes
until her death. The art works she created during the 1920s and 1930s in the
context of New Objectivity in Germany constitute the highpoint of her career.[3]
Laserstein was born in Preussisch Holland, German Empire in 1898. Her
father Hugo (1859-1902) was a pharmacist and her mother Meta (1867-1943) was a pianist, piano teacher
and a porcelain painter.[4]
Christened as a child, she grew up in an assimilated German-Jewish household.[3]
She received her artistic training at the Prussian Academy of Arts (Preußische
Akademie der Künste), which she entered only a couple of years after its
admission of female students. Here, Laserstein studied under Erich Wolfsfeld.[1]
In her final two years at the academy she advanced to one of his 'Atelier
Meisterschüler' or 'star pupil'. This entitled her to her own studio as well
as free access to models. The paintings she produced between her graduation in
1927 and 1933 in Berlin are considered to be her best works which were shown
in 20 exhibits in the city's galleries and museums.[5]
Laserstein who favored female models and the representation of female
lifeworlds blended "social representation with painterly presence".[3]
While her entire oeuvre encompasses approximately 10.000 works, 300 paintings
and 100 drawings are verified for her Berlin years. After her emigration to
Sweden, she took on mostly commissioned portrait works. Her attempts to save
the lives of her mother Meta and her sister Käte from Nazi persecution by
bringing them to Sweden were in vain. Her mother was murdered in 1943 in the
concentration camp Ravensbrück (she is remember with a stepping stone at
Immenweg 7, Berlin), and her sister survived deeply traumatized in
hiding and died in 1965.
Self-portrait with A Cat (1928)
Traute washing
Self Portrait
Self Portrait
Die Tennisspielerin (The
Tennis Player, 1929)
Abend über Potsdam (Evening over Potsdam)
Berlin in the 1920s was a center of cultural production as well as
political and economic struggle. Laserstein painted cadavers to illustrate
text books to obtain cash during the period of hyperinflation..[1]
During this time women were growing in independence and were increasingly
entering the workplace. Laserstein depicted contemporary women of many stripes
and fashions, including New Woman types, who adopted a more masculine look,
and female nudes. As a single professional woman, Laserstein herself embodied
the New Woman, and her androgynous look is evident in her many self-portraits,
for example, Self-portrait with A Cat (1928) at the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery.[6]
Her most famous paintings, for example Die Tennisspielerin (The
Tennis Player, 1929), contributed to the verism of New Objectivity
movement but also showed continuity with German Naturalism.[7]
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 needed the co-operation of friends
to transport it.[1]
The elegiac scene references Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper and Jan
Vermeer von Delft's Milkmaid in order to convey the particular affect,
temporality and political stalemate of 1930.[5]
During the Nazi period in Germany, Laserstein emigrated to Sweden, where
she stayed in Stockholm and the city of
Kalmar. She
died in Kalmar on January 21, 1993.
Laserstein was rediscovered in 1987, when
Thomas Agnew & Sons and the Belgrave Gallery organized a joint exhibition
and sale of works she had retained in her personal collection, including
Abend über Potsdam, now in the
Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin.[8]
Laserstein attended the exhibition together with her close friend and model of
many decades, Traute (Gertrud) Rose.[1]
Her painting Traute washing was the first purchase by the
National Museum of Women in the Arts with its own funds.[9]
In 2003, the first comprehensive retrospective of Laserstein's oeuvre was
held in Berlin. In-depth research was carried out by Anna-Carola Krausse which
was synthesized in the exhibition catalogue, Lotte Laserstein: My Only
Reality.[10]
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