Portraits and self-portraits by the painter Lotte Laserstein put a face on modern society in the Weimar Republic. Alongside her exhibition here at the Berlinische Galerie, BG has chosen some other (self-)portraits by artists who were living and working in Berlin at the same time as Laserstein.
Berlin’s Lotte Laserstein (1898-1993) was one of the most sensitive portrait painters of the early Modernist period when tradition vied with innovation. By the time she was 30, she was a well-known and successful artist. Her career was brutally ended in 1933. Berlin’s public museum of modern art, photography and architecture will show 58 works – 48 paintings and 9 drawings – by Laserstein along with documents reflecting her professional heyday in Berlin and her exile in Sweden.
Plain and functional elegance, colourful Pop Art, a historical cathedral flavour – the metro stations built in Berlin between 1953 and 1994 with their distinctive post-war and post-modernist feel are still a defining feature in the daily lives of Berlin’s residents. Once threatened by radical revamps, 27 of these 82 undergound structures are now listed monuments, thanks to a dedicated younger generation of academics, photographers and film-makers.