Lotte Laserstein

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Lotte Laserstein at work on her painting Evening over Potsdam ; Photograph by Wanda von Debschitz-Kunowski , around 1930

Lotte Laserstein (born November 28, 1898 in Prussian Holland in the East Prussian Oberland ; † January 21, 1993 in Kalmar , Sweden ) was a German-Swedish painter. She is considered an important representative of figurative painting during the Weimar Republic . During the National Socialist era , she emigrated to Sweden in 1937 due to anti-Semitism in the German Reich . In Sweden she worked as a portraitist and landscape painter until her death. The pictures created in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s are close to the New Objectivity and are considered the high point of her extensive work.

life and work

Berlin memorial plaque on the house, Jenaer Strasse 3, in Berlin-Wilmersdorf
Stumbling stone for Lotte Laserstein's mother in front of the house at Immenweg 7, in Berlin-Steglitz

Lotte Laserstein was born in what was then East Prussia in Prussian Holland near Elbing (Prussia). In 1927 she completed her studies with Erich Wolfsfeld at the United State Schools for Free and Applied Art in Berlin - as one of the first women with distinction. The central theme of her work was portrait painting. The pictures that were created between 1927 and 1933, when she was able to work relatively independently of commissions, are considered to be the most important today. They are "portraits between social representation and a painterly presence" that can be seen as "depicting the reality of women in life". In 1925 she met her long-time friend Traute Rose , whom she portrayed in numerous pictures. Lotte Laserstein's complete oeuvre comprises an estimated 10,000 works, including around 300 paintings and 100 drawings for the Berlin years. The baptized and assimilated Jewish woman lived mainly from commissioned portraits from 1937, the year she fled to Sweden . Her efforts during the Second World War to save her mother Meta as well as her sister Käte and her partner Rose Ollendorf to Sweden were in vain. The mother was murdered in 1943 in the Ravensbrück concentration camp , the sister survived the war traumatized in hiding in Berlin . She died in 1965.

The breakthrough to international artistic recognition came with a series of exhibitions that began at the Royal Academy of Arts (London) in autumn 1985 under the title “German Art in the 20th Century”. The show was on view at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart in spring 1986 . A traveling exhibition about German emigrated artists was shown in 1986 in London and Berlin, among others. In the same year, the London Hayward Gallery showed artists from Scandinavia under the title “Dreams of a Summer Night”, before a solo exhibition of Laserstein's works was shown jointly by the two London galleries Agnews and The Belgrave in 1987, in which the elderly painter worked closely with her friend model Traute Rose was present. The exhibition initiated Lotte Laserstein's "rediscovery". Lotte Laserstein was still an artist at the age of 92.

The artist was published and scientifically recognized from the 1990s, a. a. through Marsha Meskimmon's research on 1920s art. Traute Rose had prepared a biography about Lotte Laserstein, but it was not published.

The Nationalgalerie in Berlin has owned the painting Evening over Potsdam from 1930 since 2010. The picture is considered to be Laserstein's "main work" and is to open the future exhibition on modernism in the Neue Nationalgalerie as the first picture.

In 2007, the Tempelhof-Schöneberg district named a short driveway to a parking garage at Berlin Südkreuz station in the Schöneberg district after her.

In 2014, the Frankfurt Städelsche Kunstinstitut acquired Laserstein's painting Russian Girl with Powder Compact (1928) from the Nybro municipality . With the portrait of a girl using a powder compact to check the position of her bob hairstyle in a large mirror, the painter took part in the competition “The Most Beautiful German Woman Portrait” in 1928 and made it into the final round of the 26 selected pictures that were in Berlin Galerie Gurlitt were exhibited.

On June 22, 2020, the Berlin cultural administration installed a Berlin memorial plaque for Lotte Laserstein on her former home at Jenaer Straße 3 in Berlin-Wilmersdorf .

Retrospectives since 2000

  • 2003: Lotte Laserstein (1898–1993) retrospective - My only reality. The hidden museum e. V. in cooperation with the Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin, Museum Ephraim-Palais in Berlin
  • 2004: Lotte Laserstein - min enda verklighet. Kalmar Konstmuseum, Sweden
  • 2005: star blackout. Lotte Laserstein and Nelly Sachs - om exilens villkor. Jewish Museum Stockholm
  • 2006: Lotte Laserstein - ur exilens anonymitet. Bror Hjorths Hus, Uppsala
  • 2018/2019: Lotte Laserstein - Face to Face. Städel Museum , Frankfurt am Main. The exhibition was in spring / summer 2019 under the same title and "expanded with portraits, landscape paintings, late works and pictures from her artistic environment of the 1920s / 30s" also in the Berlinische Galerie , Berlin, and at the turn of the year 2019/2020 in the Kunsthalle Kiel to see.

literature

  • Laserstein, Lotte (Lolu) . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General Lexicon of Fine Artists of the XX. Century. tape 3 : K-P . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1956, p. 178 .
  • Caroline Stroude: Lotte Laserstein. In: Lotte Laserstein. Paintings and Drawings from Germany and Sweden, 1920-1970. Thos. Agnew's & Sons and The Belgrave Gallery, London 1987, OCLC 272505220 , pp. 3-6.
  • Caroline Stroude, Adrian Stroude: Lotte Laserstein and the German Naturalist Tradition . In: Woman's Art Journal . tape 9 , no. 1 , 1988, p. 35-38 , doi : 10.2307 / 1358361 , JSTOR : 1358361 .
  • Anna-Carola Krausse: Lotte Laserstein - My only reality. Exhibition catalog. Philo Fine Arts, Dresden 2003, ISBN 3-364-00609-1 . Slightly revised new edition, Deutscher Kunstverlag, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-422-07454-5
  • Christina Tillmann: The Last Supper. The painter Lotte Laserstein is rediscovered with an exhibition in the Ephraim-Palais . In: Der Tagesspiegel November 7, 2003.
  • Anna-Carola Krausse: Och livet bröts itu. In: Star Darkening. Lotte Laserstein and Nelly Sachs - om exilens villkor. Judiska Museet, Stockholm 2005, ISBN 91-974363-4-8 , pp 21-73. (Exhibition catalog for the Swedish retrospective; Swedish / English)
  • Anna-Carola Krausse: Lotte Laserstein (1898–1993). Life and work. Zugl. Diss., Berlin University of the Arts 2003. Reimer Verlag, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-496-01347-8 .
  • Karoline Hille: The well-known stranger. Lotte Laserstein and the cultural memory . In: Neue Gesellschaft / Frankfurter Hefte . No. 12/2018, p. 72ff.
  • Hanno Rauterberg : A risk called proximity. In: Die Zeit , Hamburg, No. 38, September 13, 2018, p. 55.
Fiction
  • Fredrik Sjöberg : About quitting. About the volatility of fame and how to deal with failure. Translation Paul Berf . Galiani, Berlin 2018.

Web links

Commons : Lotte Laserstein  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Krausse: Lotte Laserstein, life and work. 2006, p. 13.
  2. ^ Krausse: Lotte Laserstein, life and work. 2006, p. 11, footnote 5.
  3. ^ Krausse: Lotte Laserstein, life and work. 2006, p. 94.
  4. ↑ Actually: Gertrud Rose, b. Süssenbach: Lotte Laserstein. Face to face . Städel Museum. 2018. Retrieved December 5, 2018.
  5. ↑ Traute Rose, Dunes on Amrum. In: www.mehlis.eu. Retrieved March 11, 2019 .
  6. ↑ Caroline Stroude, Adrian Stroude: Lotte Laserstein and the German naturalist tradition . In: Woman's Art Journal . tape 9 , no. 1 , 1988, p. 35–38, 35 with further references , doi : 10.2307 / 1358361 , JSTOR : 1358361 (cited: John Russel Taylor: The Lost Ladies Four. In: The Times, November 10, 1987, and: Giles Auty: Overdue Tribute. In : The Spectator, October 31, 1987, 45.).
  7. ^ Krausse: Lotte Laserstein, life and work. 2006, p. 13, footnote 19.
  8. ↑ Quotes from the material collected for this purpose processed: Caroline Stroude, Adrian Stroude: Lotte Laserstein and the German Naturalist Tradition . In: Woman's Art Journal . tape 9 , no. 1 , 1988, p. 35-38 , doi : 10.2307 / 1358361 , JSTOR : 1358361 .
  9. ↑ Dieter Scholz: Evening about Potsdam: To the acquisition of the main work of Lotte Laserstein . In: Museumsjournal Berlin & Potsdam, No. 1, 2011, pp. 38–39.
  10. ↑ Press release from the Städel on the purchase of the painting “Russian Girl with Powder Compact”. (Archive link)
  11. ↑ Central Council of Jews in Germany Kdö.R: In memory of Lotte Laserstein. June 22, 2020, accessed June 23, 2020 .
  12. ↑ Lotte Laserstein. Retrieved April 27, 2018 .
  13. ↑ Lotte Laserstein. Retrieved April 5, 2019 .
  14. ↑ See the review by Olaf Peters in: Sehepunkte, 8 from July 15, 2008.
personal data
SURNAME Laserstein, Lotte
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter
DATE OF BIRTH November 28, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Prussian Holland
DATE OF DEATH January 21, 1993
Place of death Kalmar , Sweden