Oct 30, 2024
Modern Art & Design Presents Lotte Laserstein
Polly Tieck
Bukowskis presents the work "Polly Tieck" by Lotte Laserstein at the upcoming auction Modern Art & Design – Scandinavia's leading live auction for modern art and design. "Polly Tieck" was featured in the exhibition “Die Frau von heute” in Berlin in 1929 and is one of the few 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 the word "politics," was a pseudonym for the German cultural journalist Ilse Amalie Ehrenfried (1893 Berlin - 1975 Chile). After the Nazis 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 gave up marriage and family in order to pursue her artistic career, could identify to a great extent with this emerging image of women. However, Laserstein does not explicitly criticise this role – as in the work of Hannah Höch, for example, whose photomontages link the media image of the modern woman to the reality of society and show that the situation of women had not changed much in practice. Her portraits of women nevertheless offer a counter-image to common clichés, as they never objectify or depict the individuals as stereotypes, despite a certain stylisation.
The writer Polly Tieck, known for her sharp pen, is portrayed by Laserstein with a cigarette and a shiny monocle. The attributes that, according to one art critic, would ‘emphasise her modernity’ do not appear as flashy fashion accessories in the portrait. Instead, they are a natural part of her personality. The light that filters through her openwork hat brim and dances across her face like rays of sunlight on waves of water, enlivens the otherwise quiet model. This emphasises the ‘mercury in her veins’ and reminds contemporary viewers of the ‘lightly rippling style’ in which she wrote. Laserstein portrays her as pensive and noticeably isolated. Her distance from the background figures waiting in a passive stance emphasises her professional role as a vigilant observer.
Ola Alsen, author of popular fiction and editor of the fashion magazine Elegante Welt, in turn appears as a representative of the sophisticated career woman. With her elegant fur stole and a radiant white smile, she personifies the fashionable world that the famous fashion writer represented in public.
The reactions to both portraits, shown in the exhibition Die Frau von heute in 1929, clearly show that Lotte Laserstein was highly skilled in bringing out a deep characterisation behind the stylised surface. Although these portraits present their subjects as public figures, the artist gives her famous models a certain intimacy through their introspective gazes. Laserstein does not reduce his 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 portrayal of character that the sitters 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.
The work will be sold at Modern Art & Design
Estimate 1 000 000 – 1 200 000 SEK
Online catalogue will be published on November 5
Viewing November 14–18, Berzelii Park 1, Stockholm
Live auction November 19–20, Arsenalsgatan 2, Stockholm
Read more about Modern Art & Design
View the catalogue
Selected works by Lotte Laserstein at Modern Art & Design
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