Lotte Laserstein (1898 - 1993)

Lotte Laserstein

Lotte Laserstein was a German-Swedish artist and a prominent representative of German realism.

Lotte was a student at the prestigious Berlin Academy of Fine Arts and became an accomplished realist painter, receiving a gold medal from the Academy for her work. Her first exhibition took place in 1930 at a Berlin gallery. Laserstein worked partly in figurative painting, had apprentices, and illustrated anatomy texts to earn money. She also painted portraits of cosmopolitan, emancipated women as well as self-portraits.

The National Socialist regime forced the artist to leave Germany in 1937 and emigrate to Sweden. Her mother died in a concentration camp. Lotte Laserstein lived in Stockholm until the end of her life, creating over five decades of work, in addition to expressive self-portraits, many moving images of other immigrants, rural landscapes and urban scenes in Sweden.

Lotte Laserstein became a member of the Swedish Academy of Fine Arts and earned a reputation as a popular and respected portraitist. She has approximately 10,000 works in her oeuvre.