Lotte Laserstein

Lotte Laserstein (1898 –1993) was a German-Swedish painter. She was an important artist of figurative paintings in Germany's Weimar Republic.

Lotte Laserstein, Portrait of a Lady, around 1940

Berlin in the 1920s was a center of cultural production as well as political and economic struggle. Laserstein painted cadavers to illustrate textbooks to obtain cash during the period of hyperinflation.[1] During this time women were growing in independence and were increasingly entering the workplace. Laserstein depicted contemporary women of many stripes and fashions, including New Woman types, who adopted a more masculine look, and female nudes. As a single professional woman, Laserstein herself embodied the New Woman, and her androgynous look is evident in her many self-portraits.

Lotte Laserstein, "Woman with a red beret", around 1931

The National Socialist regime and its anti-Semitism forced her to leave Germany in 1937 and to emigrate to Sweden. In Sweden, she continued to work as a portraitist and painter of landscapes until her death. The art works she created during the 1920s and 1930s in the context of New Objectivity in Germany constitute the highpoint of her career.