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6/11/2003

My only reality

Museum Ephraim Palace, Berlin

"This is a name to note. It is cited justifiably among the very best of the younger generation of painters. The ascent of Lotte Laserstein's shining talent requires continuing observation", predicted the reviewer in Berliner Tageblatt in 1928 when the recent graduate held her maiden exhibition. He was wrong. True, in 1927 Lotte Laserstein (born in 1898) became one of the first women to complete her studies (with a distinction to boot) at Berlin's artistic academy, and a few years later she ranked with the best-known women artists in the capital, but the brilliant career forecast for her was thwarted by political events. The racial ideology of the National Socialists declared Lotte La­ser­stein a "three-quarter Jew", and as a consequence she was excluded from public activity as an artist.

With her living and working conditions increasingly tenuous, Lotte Laserstein decided in 1937 to emigrate to Sweden - a move which saved her initially but, as she later pointed out, "broke my life in two pieces". Although she benefited all along from Sweden's "open-arm refugee policy" and managed, unlike many other emigré artists, male and female alike, to earn a living from her painting, the material and mental strains of exile ultimately prevented her from upholding her former intensity and quality of work. Looking back today, her Berlin period prior to emigration stands out as the zenith of a prolific ?uvre which continued until ripe old age.

Some years have passed since the Anglo-Saxon world first celebrated Lotte Laserstein as a "most exciting discovery" and acknowledged her as one of the great women artists of the 20th century. In Germany, however, she is unknown outside a small circle of initiates. Once the war was over, few recalled the name the painter had made for herself during her short active career in her own country; those works in public collections that might have paid testimony to her existence and creativity had fallen prey to Nazi "purging". Post-war art history in West Germany was preoccupied with Abstract art, and this contributed in its own way to Lotte Laserstein being consigned to oblivion in her former country. The principal aim of this retrospective is to re-acquaint a broad German public with Laserstein at last and to establish her in her rightful place within the diverse art spectrum of the Weimar Republic. Berlin seems the right place for this initial exhibition, not only because of the role it played in her history. It is an appropriate tribute to the artist that an honour long overdue is now paid to her in the city where she painted her most important works and which she was compelled to leave against her will in 1937.

The works
The Lotte Laserstein we are urged to rediscover is an outstanding artist of the late Weima­r Re­public. She combined an academic heritage expressed in a refined painterly culture with the contemporary motifs of modern urban life. She painted coffee houses (In the Tavern, 1927), sporty women (The Tennis Player, 1929), a young motorcyclist in leathers (By the Motorbike, 1929) and foreign faces encountered on the streets of the cosmopolitan capital (Mongolian, 1927 and Russian Girl, 1928). In portraits of herself and of her friend Traute Rose, she repeatedly explored current images of New Woman. Working with Traute Rose, declared by Laserstein to be her "favourite model", inspired some of her best work, including some subtly composed artist/model duos (In My Studio, 1928, I and My Model, 1929/30, At the Mirror, 1930).

The unsentimental approach and thematic predilections of Lotte Laserstein's paintings betray a certain affinity with New Objectivity - and yet they do not quite fit this historical pigeonhole. They do not share its hallmarks of sleek coldness, caustic bite or surgical social critique. Lotte Laser­stein does not exaggerate or caricature, nor does she seek out sleazy or exotic subjects. Rather, she formulates her sober observation of the everyday world in brushwork which emphasizes materiality with a well-controlled sensuality. Her objectivity is mimesis. An incontestable command of painterly technique is the tried-and-tested evidence she submits to demonstrate her professional standards. Laserstein does not shy from the "art of our fathers" lampooned by the avant-garde. Far from it. She draws playfully on the rich iconographic trove of art history; she quotes, alludes, creates variations. Parallel to this, she also borrows the aesthetic vocabulary of contemporary imagery, from photography to fashionable illustrated magazines and the world of advertising. With this blend of painterly traditionalism and popular aesthetics Lotte Laserstein establishes a new, artistically innovative position. There is nothing backward-looking about her original synthesis of the traditional and the modern. In fact, her creative output is powerfully contemporary.

Laserstein's Realism, an interplay of distance and proximity, objectivity and sensitivity, monumentality and intimacy, breaks away from the confines of New Objectivity. For the most part, these are scenes of a quiet persistence with a soundless, motionless quality that fascinates yet disconcerts. The "Roaring Twenties" have fallen silent, new-objective coolness gives way to an earnest, precognizant stillness percolated by subdued melancholy (Evening over Potsdam, 1930).

In 1937 an invitation from the Galerie Moderne in Stockholm presented an auspicious opportunity for Lotte Laserstein to leave Germany with a large proportion of her works. Six months later an arranged marriage provided Swedish citizenship. A number of high-ranking commissions quickly established her reputation as a talented portrait artist in the host country. Her clients were to include the king's chamberlain Graf Erik Trolle, Ruben Rau­sing, Charles Juhlin-Dannfelt, Natanael Beskow, Gillis Hammar, Torgny Seger­stedt, Hilding Rosenberg and Jascha Golo­vanjuk - to name but a few. In Sweden Lotte Laserstein also devoted greater attention to landscape painting. Brightly coloured, delicately worked impressions of her new home (Street in Örebro, 1942), atmospheric views from the archipelago and sensitive brush drawings assured her a broader popularity. The post-war years, however, were governed by more Abstract tastes, and so Lotte Laserstein failed to achieve integration into the higher echelons of Swedish art. A personal and artistic crisis followed, expressed in a series of striking self-portraits. This intensive spate of self-depiction enabled the artist to rediscover her own artistic strengths - and the energy to continue working for almost forty more years. Lotte Laserstein died in 1993 at the age of 94 in the southern Swedish town of Kalmar.

The exhibition
The focus of the Lotte Laserstein retrospective is her Berlin ouvre, scattered today to the four winds. Her prolific opus in exile, where commissioned work dominates, is presented in the form of selected specimens which trace the continuities and breaks, successes and failures, self-doubt and attempts at self-assertion which attended the artist's life as an emigrée. For the first time, the full diversity of Lotte Laserstein's impressive ?uvre will be on show, thanks to generous loans from Sweden, Britain, Germany, Norway, Canada and the United States. Alongside almost 100 paintings and some 50 drawings and prints dating from every period in her productive life, a wealth of historical and personal documents from the artist's posthumous papers will illustrate the character and development of a woman painter whose destiny and creative output were particularly influenced by the major political, special and cultural crises and upheavals of the 20th century.
The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive book, including a catalogue raisonné on CD-ROM, published for the occasion by Philo Fine Arts, Dresden.

Ephraim-Palais Museum
Poststr. 16
10178 Berlin - Mitte
Tel. 0 30 - 24 00 2 - 121

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