Lotte Laserstein

The first time I saw Lotte Laserstein’s paintings, I was electrified. We didn’t find her work in a small gallery or an old exhibition catalogue, and although a Scandinavian colleague and friend had tried to point us in her direction before, our eyes were not really opened until we saw a truly amazing exhibition devoted to her at the Städel museum in Frankfurt in 2018.

You can count yourself very fortunate as an art dealer if you occasionally able to hold very special pieces in your hands and are allowed to promote them. Discovering an artist of this quality for yourself brings you much more than a great feeling of joy; it is a revelation. Usually, we come across the most important artists somewhere sometime, at least that’s what we think! My fascination for Laserstein’s works rendered me speechless. How could she have ever been forgotten?! Yet, words were no longer needed, because we couldn’t stop looking – one picture after the other, always discovering something new, always wishing to see more, always wanting to look closer.

“Zwei Jungen mit Öllampe” (Two Boys with an Oil Lamp) is an early masterpiece by this artist who was labelled a so-called “quarter Jew” and had to leave Berlin and Germany in 1937, despite her success and her accolades. Like the lives of her family, her career was abruptly disrupted by the horrors of the Nazi regime. While these events would remain very bitter, the fact that she was able to establish herself in Scandinavia and was still alive when she was rediscovered in exhibitions in London galleries in the 1990s could be considered some sort of gratification from today’s point of view.

I am amazed by Laserstein’s painting because she focuses on people as the centre of her oeuvre despite, or maybe because of, the difficult circumstances in which she lived. She did not feel the need to prove her academic skills as a painter, although she was one of the first women artists to attend an art academy. She may have paid careful attention to the features of the people she was portraying by using her well-trained eye, but her main concern was not an academically correct depiction of those people or of objects. She concentrated completely on the soul of whomever she was portraying and on the expression of their feelings. In this regard, she was very versatile – for example, in her application of paint – despite her clearly figurative style. She not only played with brushwork, but also painted some areas more precisely and some more freely, which is what makes her work very fresh and modern.

In this painting, Laserstein concentrates on the large eyes of the two boys as well as their innocent faces, which she renders in the flickering light of an oil lamp, which they are looking at with great fascination. The austere room, which is left more or less undefined, is filled with the warm, dancing light, as if the artist wanted to wrap the children in the warm glow of the oil lamp. She worked with freer, softer and broader brushstrokes around the boys, and we can imagine it is icy cold outside and the flame emits some warmth. Because Laserstein primarily painted friends and their children during the economically tough years at the end of the Weimar Republic, it could very well be that these are two Jewish children she has painted here whom she wanted to protect from the rising terror of the Nazis by cropping the image as she does and by draping them in the warm light, while also documenting them for posterity. Most importantly, the flame should be understood as a sign of hope. That the children were able to leave the events of the outside world behind for a moment is also a thought that brings me joy. I like to imagine how Lotte Laserstein observed situations like these – and people in general – with the same great fascination and was able to forget her worries and problems for an instant while she was painting. In this moment, a perfect symbiosis between beholder, artist and the people she portrays emerges. Moments and thoughts like these fascinate me and make me happy.

Manuel Ludorff