Lotte Laserstein, German painter in exile

Lotte Laserstein was born in 1898 in a small town in eastern Prussia, now a part of Poland. When, in 1927, she was the first woman to finish her studies at the Berlin Academy, she was predicted to have a fine career as an artist. That was without counting on National Socialism. Indeed, the Nazis declared that, her origins being partly Jewish, she was banished from all public life.

Berlin in the 1920s was an uneasy yet exciting place. Laserstein painted cadavers to illustrate text books, as a means of surviving during the hyperinflation period. During this time women were becoming more independent, choosing their appearance in a freer manner, often with a masculine accent. Laserstein’s work incorporated a number of metropolitan subjects, such as fashionable Neue Fraus (New women), tennis players, journalists, a motorcycle rider in his leathers, often in urban settings. 

Painting in her studio

In 1937, the invitation of a Swedish gallery gave Laserstein the opportunity to leave Germany, now under Nazi rule, with a number of her paintings. Six months later, she gets married to obtain Swedish nationality. To survive, she paints mostly commissioned portraits, but also landscapes. Like many other exiles, she suffers from the material and psychological conditions of exile and her work lacks the brilliance of the Berlin years.

She remained outside the avant-garde currents and her style is sober, traditional and realistic, without the cold side of the new objectivism, or without caricature like the Expressionists.

After the Second World War, abstract painting is in vogue, and despite a small breakthrough in the Anglo-Saxon countries in the early 1990s, she remained unknown in Germany, her native country.

She died in 1993.