Lotte Laserstein

Lotte Laserstein (1898–1993) is one of the art world’s most exciting recent rediscoveries. Exhibitions of her work in Germany have attracted broad audiences eager to explore this long-forgotten artist and have established a place for her in the history of twentieth-century art. However, these shows focused primarily on Laserstein’s work from the 1920s to the beginning of the 1930s – the period before she was forced to leave Germany and emigrate to Sweden.

“A Divided Life” focuses as much on the multifaceted works she created in exile in Sweden as it does on those she made before leaving Germany.

Lotte Laserstein described her life and her career with the words: “My escape to Sweden broke my life in two.” This division has shaped the structure of the exhibition.

“Through Lotte Laserstein’s representational commissioned portraits, expressive self-portraits, moving depictions of other immigrants, and landscapes and urban scenes, it is possible to discern what living in exile was like”, says the curators Iris Müller-Westermann and Anna-Carola Krausse, and continues:

Laserstein's Swedish work raises questions about what it means to lose one’s own cultural and social milieu and be forced to establish roots in a new society.

Evening Over Potsdam (1930)

The exhibition in Stockholm includes Lotte Laserstein’s large-scale masterpiece “Evening Over Potsdam”. The tableau of young people sitting on a balcony at twilight in pensive silence poignantly symbolises the social crisis and perplexity that marked the end of the Weimar Republic.

The genesis of the painting is well documented. The long wooden panel on which it is painted was first transported with Berlin’s suburban rail service to Potsdam, and from there by horse and cart to its destination at the home of acquaintances who had a large roof terrace with a view across Potsdam. The friends got together for the first sketches, but the background and the protracted labour of painting the portraits was done in the Berlin studio.

In Sweden Laserstein retitled it “Mina Vänner” (My Friends), as if in homage to what she had left behind.