how Lotte Laserstein’s paintbox saved her during Nazi-era exile

In 1937, a gallery in Stockholm invited Lotte Laserstein (1898-1993) to deliver over a few of her finest work for an exhibition. The provide proved to be a lifeline. The German-born artist was already on the top of her profession in Berlin, with critics praising her work of latest topics (such because the liberated trendy girl) in a conventional realist model. However when the Nazis rose to energy, she was edged out as an artist of Jewish descent. Heading to Sweden—and unexpectedly staying there when hostilities escalated throughout her keep—turned her ticket to survival, one which additionally allowed her to maintain portray.

Now, a retrospective on the Moderna Museet in Malmö is bolstering her legacy in her adopted residence of 56 years. Laserstein’s work has seen a wave of rediscovery over the previous few years, however her current solo exhibition—which confirmed in Berlin, Frankfurt and Kiel between 2018 and 2020—exhibited solely the early works she produced in Germany. Lotte Laserstein: A Divided Life, however, places equal weight on the later works she created in Sweden, and is the biggest institutional show of her work up to now, with round 85 work.

In exile Laserstein created piercing self-portraits the place she usually seems androgynous, nudes of girls from a distinctly feminine perspective, portraits of different immigrants and landscapes. Her works are characterised by stillness, tinted with subdued, earthy colors. A few of her first-ever commissions there have been in Malmö, proper after that 1937 gallery exhibition, together with a portrait of Erik Trolle (the valet of Sweden’s King Gustaf).

Though Laserstein was capable of help herself in Sweden as an artist, she didn’t see a lot public recognition till the late Nineteen Seventies. “My life was carved into two chunks of just about equal measurement: childhood, youth, coaching, my first unbiased work and leaving Germany, then a brand new laborious begin in Sweden,” Laserstein wrote within the Nineteen Eighties. “If I had not had my very own actuality in my paintbox, that little case that led me from Skåne through Stockholm to Jämtland, I couldn’t have borne these years when every thing was taken from me: household, mates and residential. I retrieved a few of it due to ‘my solely actuality’.”

• Lotte Laserstein: A Divided Life, Moderna Museet, Malmö, 6 Might-1 October; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 11 November-14 April 2024