Children with Handcart, 1932

Lotte Laserstein

Narrator: In the 1930s Lotte Laserstein took her art students on annual excursions to the countryside. In 1932 they went to Neu St. Jürgen, a little village on the bog Teufelsmoor near Bremen, not far from the former artists’ colony Worpswede, where Paula Modersohn Becker had lived. The painters from Berlin stayed in a simple guesthouse and hired children, elderly people in need of extra income and day laborers to come and sit for them in return for a decent payment.

Among these were the girl and boy lost in thought standing by a handcart containing a younger child.Inward looking, close together, and yet taking no notice of each other, this group of children display a melancholy. Only the rich velvet red of the sweater and the fidgety fists of the blond toddler animate the static composition in muted tones. Despite the low angle that lends the models a monumental quality, there is nothing heroic about these country children. They appear, rather, to be yielding to their destiny as they gaze across the brown heath. The light, dulled by dark clouds, reinforces the subdued atmosphere. There is also a reference to Christian iconography, for at first sight the upturned handle of the cart resembles a cross held piously by the boy with his back to the viewer.