Man from Mongolia, 1927

Lotte Laserstein

Narrator: Lotte Laserstein was confident about drawing on the repertoire of art history to reinterpret established visual conventions, but she was equally amenable to picking up formal codes from the imagery of her own day. A number of her compositions took their cu e from photography, which flourished in the 1920s with so many illustrated magazines on the market hungry for input. As photographers competed for page space, they experimented with unfamiliar angles to create interesting images. One innovative device was the close up, radically filling the frame with a face.

Laserstein borrowed this mode for her portrait “Man from Mongolia”. Although the artist has zoomed in on her model, challenging the viewer to walk up close to the small format, the sitter himself strangely keeps his distance. Although he seems to be looking straight at us, we cannot catch his eye. In fact, the longer we look into his face, the more the man seems to turn inward. It is this being at one with himself that lends him dignity and individualit y. There is no fodder here for intrusive exoticism or arrogant stares. The fascination in this portrait derives from the impenetrable expression of the model with his powerful yet detached presence.

The sitter was recently identified. He was an actor named Mammey Terja Basa who appeared in several feature films during the 1920s and earned a living as a model at the Berlin Art Academy.