Lotte Laserstein

(German, 1898–1993)

Lotte Laserstein was a German-born Swedish painter best known for her realistic portraits of women in urban settings. Laserstein’s paintings combine the psychological qualities of New Objectivity painters like Christian Schad with the precise naturalism, contour lines, and smooth paint application of the 16th-century painter Hans Holbein. Born on November 28, 1898 in Preussich Holland, Germany to a Jewish family, Laserstein went on to study under Erich Wolfsfeld at the Berlin Academy, where she was introduced to and influenced by the works of Adolph Menzel. Due to her Jewish heritage, she was forced to flee Nazi Germany, emigrating to Sweden in 1937. Today, her works are in the collections of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C. and the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin among others. The artist died on January 21, 1993 in Kalmar, Sweden.