Lotte Laserstein

"Polly Tieck" was included in the exhibition "Die Frau von heute" in Berlin in 1929 and is one of the paintings that the artist brought with her to Sweden. The work was acquired directly from the artist in 1983 during the exhibition A Life – Lotte Laserstein at Skäldby Gård in Kalmar and has since been passed down to the current owner.

Polly Tieck, a play on "politics," was a pseudonym for the German cultural journalist Ilse Amalie Ehrenfried (1893 Berlin - 1975 Chile). After the National Socialists came to power, she, like many of her female friends, was forced to stop working as a journalist.

"By the end of the 1920s, the emancipated New Woman was no longer an exception but had rather become a fashion phenomenon, shaped and supported by both the press and industry. Lotte Laserstein, who renounced marriage and family to pursue her artistic career, could largely identify with this emerging image of womanhood. However, an explicit critical examination of this role – as found, for example, in the works of Hannah Höch, where she connects the media image of the modern woman to the realities of society and shows that women's situations had not changed much in practice – is absent in Laserstein's work. Her portraits of women nonetheless provide a counter-image to common clichés, as they, despite a certain stylisation, never objectify or stereotype the depicted individuals.

The journalist Polly Tieck, known for her sharp pen, is portrayed by Laserstein with a cigarette and a gleaming monocle. The attributes that, according to an art critic, would "underscore her modernity," do not appear as ostentatious fashion accessories in the portrait. Instead, they are a natural part of her personality. The light filtering through her wide-brimmed hat and dancing across her face like sunbeams on water waves brings life to the otherwise placid model. This highlights the "quicksilver in her veins" and reminds contemporary viewers of the "lightly bubbling style" she wrote in. Laserstein depicts her as contemplative and noticeably isolated. The distance to the background figures, who wait in passive postures, emphasises her professional role as a vigilant observer.

Ola Alsen, author of popular fiction and editor of the fashion magazine Elegante Welt, emerges in turn as a representative of the sophisticated career woman. With her elegant fur stole and a radiant white smile, she becomes a personification of the fashionable world that the famous fashion writer publicly represented.

The reactions to both portraits, which were shown in the exhibition Die Frau von heute in 1929, clearly demonstrate that Lotte Laserstein was very skilled at revealing a deep character portrayal behind the stylised surface. Although these portraits depict the sitters as public figures, the artist grants her well-known models a certain intimacy through their inward gazes. Laserstein does not reduce her portraits to the public roles that Ola Alsen and Polly Tieck were perceived to have, but instead allows the outer role and the inner character (the individual personality) to unite in a harmonious whole. It is through this subtle character portrayal that the depicted individuals emerge as convincing representatives of the type they publicly embody – modern women, defined by their personalities.” Anna-Carola Krausse, "Meine einzige Wirklichkeit", Berlin, 2022, pp. 83-85.