October 1, 2022
A keen social observer, German New Woman (“Neue Fraue”), portraitist, emigré–Lotte Laserstein and her sensitive paintings provide a snapshot of Weimar Republic society while her later life reflects the challenges faced by refugees in exile. Considered “one of the great recent art historical rediscoveries” of the twentieth-century, Laserstein (1898-1993) explored the female gaze in nude paintings, portraits, and self-portraits that are both intimate and sensual, revealing the anxieties and social tensions of her time. A star talent in the Weimar Republic (1918-1933), Laserstein’s career prospered until Nazi persecution forced her to flee and sink into relative obscurity. Now rediscovered, Laserstein is celebrated for her tender and compelling paintings of the German New Woman, many of which are self-portraits.
Early Life
Lotte Laserstein was born on November 28, 1898, in Preussisch-Holland, East Prussia, German Empire, in the town now known as Pasłek, in Poland. Her father, Hugo, a pharmacist, was of Jewish parentage while her mother, Meta Birnbaum, was a pianist, piano teacher, and porcelain painter with a Jewish father. Laserstein’s younger sister, Käthe was born in 1900. The sisters were christened and grew up in an assimilated German-Jewish household. Laserstein herself said that she was raised with “no religion.” Precociously gifted, she recalled in later years that from the age of eleven she knew she wanted to become an artist and had decided never to marry.
Education
Following Hugo’s untimely death in 1902 when Laserstein was only three years old, Meta took Lotte and Käthe to live with her own widowed mother Ida Birnbaum, an artist, and her sister Elsa Birnbaum in Danzig, now Gdansk, Poland. Laserstein’s Aunt Elsa ran a private painting school for girls and gave Laserstein her first painting lessons when she was just nine years old. In 1912, the family moved to Berlin where Laserstein continued her education. By 1918, she entered Friedrich Wilhelm University to study Philosophy and History of Art as well as began attending a school for applied printing. After graduating university in 1920, Laserstein received additional private training with the painter Leo von König (1871-1944), a member of the Berlin Secession who had studied at the Académie Julian in Paris.
Lotte Laserstein painting Evening Over Potsdam, photographed by Wanda von Debschitz-Kunowski in 1930. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
In 1925, just a few years after German art schools began admitting women students for the first time, Laserstein enrolled at Berlin’s art academy, the Akademische Hochschule für bildende Künste (Academic College of Fine Arts, later renamed the United State Schools of Liberal and Applied Art) and studied under the painter Erich Wolfsfeld (1884-1956). That same year she met her future muse in tennis instructor, singer, and actress Gertrud Rose (1903-1989) whom she affectionately called Traute, a feminine German name meaning “strong” or “strength.” A star pupil, Laserstein graduated from Wolfsfeld’s master class in 1927 after winning several distinctions for her work, including the prestigious Ministermedaille (Minister’s Medal) for artistic achievement from the Prussian Ministry of Science, Art, and Education.
Berlin Studio Years, 1927-1936
Soon after graduating, Laserstein established an art studio in downtown Berlin on Friedrichsruher St, which became the setting for the painting named Self-Portrait in the Studio on Friedrichsruher St (ca. 1927), and the collaboration with Traute Rose entitled In My Studio (1928). She also ran her own private painting school there. Laserstein joined the Berlin Women Artists Association and competed in various national art contests and competitions to promote herself, including one for the “most beautiful German woman” sponsored by the German cosmetics company Elide for which she submitted the painting, Russian Girl with Compact (1928). Although Laserstein’s work was not selected, the painting did receive honorable mention.
Lotte Laserstein's Paintings of the Neue Fraue
Nowhere is the German New Woman of the Weimar Republic better visually articulated than in Laserstein’s self-portraits and in paintings depicting the muscled physique and boyish figure of her close friend and muse, Traute Rose. Laserstein, herself the embodiment of the Neue Fraue with her closely cropped-bob and androgynous appearance, also painted sensitive portraits of other fashionable Neue Fraus in metropolitan Berlin. In contrast to the often grotesque, caricature-like depictions of these emancipated women favored by her male contemporaries like Otto Dix and Max Ernst of the German Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement in which she is usually categorized, Laserstein’s paintings of the Neue Fraue manifest compassion and empathy, such as in Woman with a Red Beret (ca. 1931) and in Traute Rose with a Red Cap and Checked Blouse (ca. 1931).
German art historian and freelance curator Anna-Carola Krausse, who wrote her doctoral dissertation on Laserstein and curated the groundbreaking 2003 exhibition, “Lotte Laserstein: My Only Reality” at the Verborgene Museum and Museum Ephraim-Palais in Berlin, describes Laserstein’s painting style as “sensual objectivity,” referring to the underlying eroticism and sensuality inherent in her portraits. Laserstein’s 1927 painting, In the Tavern, which was later confiscated as “degenerate art” by the Nazis within the context of National Socialist propaganda, epitomizes the sexually-liberated Neue Fraue. Others, such as the young Russian immigrant in Girl Lying on Blue (ca. 1931) the sitter in Woman with a Red Beret (1931) display a more feminine appearance in clothing and the wearing of makeup.
Nazism and Exile in Sweden, 1937-1993
Declared a ‘‘three-quarters Jew’’ by the National Socialists when Hitler came to power, Laserstein was gradually excluded from the city’s art world from 1933 onwards. A chance to exhibit her work at the Stockholm Galerie Moderne in Sweden provided her with the opportunity to escape Germany in 1937. To obtain Swedish citizenship the next year, Laserstein resorted to a marriage of convenience with another German exile, the Jewish merchant Sven Jakob Marcus, although they never lived together. As a citizen, she would go on to reside in Sweden for the remainder of her life.
In Stockholm Laserstein found a new muse and model in Margarete Jaraczewski, a young Polish Jew who had a doctorate in economics and had emigrated to Sweden in 1938. Some twenty years Laserstein’s junior, Laserstein nicknamed her “Madeleine” (a French cookie, of course, and perhaps in Proustian terms after the memory of Traute, but also sometimes meaning “little girl” in German). Though Madeleine posed for Laserstein for many years, the paintings portraying Madeleine do not have quite the same intimacy and poignancy as the Berlin paintings with Traute, as can be seen in Madeleine in Front of the Mirror (ca. 1940s) and Madeleine-Nude, Sitting in a Chair (ca. 1941).
Laserstein struggled both personally and professionally in Sweden. She painted landscapes and took portrait commissions to support herself catering to the tastes of her patrons, such as Woman in a Café (Lotte Fischler), 1939. She also continued to document the passage of time through self-portraits (Self-Portrait at the Easel, 1938), as though to reassert her artistic identity. In 1946, after the war, Laserstein resumed contact with Traute Rose and her husband Ernst but she never returned to Germany. Hoping for better professional opportunities, Laserstein did, however, move to the city of Kalmar in the southern province of Småland, Sweden, in 1954 and lived there until her death at age 94 in 1993. She is buried on the Swedish island of Oländ where she had also enjoyed a vacation home for some forty years.
Legacy
A new appreciation for Laserstein has emerged since her death in 1993 and especially since the publication of Anna-Carola Krausse’s groundbreaking 2003 monograph, Lotte Laserstein: My Only Reality and the accompanying exhibition curated by Krausse. Considering Laserstein’s work a reflection of the social disruptions of her time has led to a reevaluation of her oeuvre. Still, outside of Europe and beyond art world circles, she remains lesser known. Contributing to Laserstein’s obscurity to American audiences is the fact that the majority of her paintings in the U.S. remain in private collections, with a notable exception being Morning Toilette (1930), depicting Traute Rose giving herself a sponge bath, acquired in 1988 by the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C.
Lotte Laserstein, Morning Toilette (Traute Washing),1930. National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC.
In 2009, a donation of Laserstein’s documentary estate was made to the Artists’ Archive at the Berlinische Galerie Museum of Modern Art in Berlin. It consists of photographs of Laserstein’s works, sketchbooks, private and professional correspondence, documents concerning her participation in exhibitions, and books from the artist’s library. In 2010, the Stadel Museum in Frankfurt purchased from Sotheby’s auction house, at well over twice the expected price, what has been called Laserstein’s “magnum opus” Evening over Potsdam (1930). This hauntingly evocative work, nearly seven feet in length, incorporates Traute Rose and her husband Ernst (on the far left, backs facing the viewer) as two of the five separate figures assembled over a simple meal on a hill overlooking the city of Potsdam. A palpable sense of sadness or ennui pervades the picture. Also contributing to Laserstein’s growing legacy, have been several career retrospectives and group exhibitions featuring her work organized throughout her native Germany and in Sweden, Austria, the United Kingdom and Switzerland with more planned for 2023 and beyond.
