FRANKFURT.- The Städel Museum is expanding its modern art holdings through the addition of an important work by Lotte Laserstein (1898–1993). The Städel is thus the first public museum in Germany outside Berlin to purchase a work by this artist. Laserstein studied at the Berlin art academy and was distinguished with the gold medal there in 1925. She had her first solo exhibition in 1931 at the prestigious Fritz Gurlitt gallery, likewise in Berlin. Her emerging career was brought to an abrupt end by National Socialism. In 1937, on account of her Jewish heritage, the artist saw herself compelled to emigrate to Sweden, where she died in 1993. She took the painting Russian Girl with Compact (1928) with her when she fled into exile in Sweden. From 1954 onward, Laserstein lived in the Southern Swedish town of Kalmar, near Nybro. In the Städel holdings, the oil painting represents a superb enhancement to the collection of works of the Weimar period and can be placed side by side with examples by Otto Dix, Maximilian Klewer, Ottilie Roederstein or Karl Hubbuch. The canvas, which is listed in the artist’s œuvre catalogue and is in excellent condition, was last shown in 2005 in the exhibition “Sternverdunkelung” at the Judiska Museet (Stockholm). It is now on display in the presentation of the Städel Museum’s modern art collection.

“Our longstanding efforts to secure a principal work by Lotte Laserstein for the Städel collection – and thus to make an important protagonist of New Objectivity accessible to our public – have now been rewarded. Thanks to a number of major acquisitions over the past years, we have succeeded in significantly expanding this area of art history within our holdings”, Städel director Max Hollein is happy to report.

Lotte Laserstein executed her most impressive works in the late 1920s and early ’30s, masterfully depicting the people of the interwar period. Her works are characterized by a sense of barrenness, melancholy and modernity. With regard to its themes and basic approach, her art bears a certain affinity to New Objectivity; her painting style, however, exhibits neither chilly objectification nor pointedly exaggerated socio-criticism. Laserstein executed numerous portraits in which she documented various types of contemporary women. The painting Russian Girl with Compact is a magnum opus by the artist in which her formal language and modernity come to bear in striking manner. It shows a fashionably dressed young lady with the boyish hairdo typical of the time. With the aid of a powder box, she is examining her hairstyle in a large mirror. The two-dimensional rendering of the background, the clothing and the mirror contrasts with the precisely executed details of the subject’s hands and face. Laserstein availed herself of aesthetic devices such as light-dark colour contrasts and the frontal view to good effect.

In 1928, Laserstein entered Russian Girl with Compact in a competition for the most beautiful portrait of a German woman, where it was chosen from among 365 works for the final round. The twenty-six paintings selected were presented at the Galerie Gurlitt and enthusiastically received by a broad public.

The Frankfurt museum acquired Russian Girl with Compact from the Swedish municipality of Nybro on its own initiative. In the 1970s, the painting had been purchased by a retirement home in Nybro directly from the artist’s holdings. The home – and with it the painting – became municipal property in the 1990s. The funds earned through the sale of the painting will be allocated in their entirety to the culture budget of the town, which has a population of 20,000. Among other purposes, the money will be used to erect a monument against racism.