A Weimar Woman & Artist: Lotte Laserstein
The recent acquisition of Lotte Laserstein’s Evening Over Potsdam (Abend über Potsdam, 1930) by the Berlin National Gallery offers the opportunity for the public to view a painting that is by any measure a masterful depiction of modernist discord and youthful ennui. As a work of art it is prescient and hugely evocative.
As an independent female artist in Germany during the 1920s, Laserstein’s work incorporated a range of metropolitan subjects, such as fashionable Neue Fraus, tennis players, journalists, a motorcycle rider in his leathers, often in urban settings. As a painter, she was decisive mark-maker, typically combining a linear, hard-edged naturalism with a muted palette of tones, and through this combination articulated a sincerity — calm, reflective, cerebral — that even to a contemporary audience is surprising and full of nuance.
Many of Laserstein’s subjects accord with the artistic customs of the day, following artists such as Otto Dix, Christian Shad and Rudolf Schlichter in exploring the urban tensions of modern Germany. Her interrogation of these themes remained more naturalist than the artists mentioned, but no less connotative of metropolitan identity and the…
