Self portrait before ‘Evening Over Potsdam’, 1950

Lotte Laserstein

Narrator: Lotte Laserstein here paints herself before one of her most important works from the Berlin years, “Evening Over Potsdam”, from 1930. Now, twenty years later in Stockholm, she stands dressed in a painting coat before her easel. Laserstein is about to paint the self portrait we are looking at, which is identical to the picture she sees in the mirror. Instead of looking forward in time, she looks back, perhaps to be better able to understand herself in the present day. The artist’s gaze out of the picture and into the mirror is serious and pensive.

When “Evening Over Potsdam” was painted, Laserstein was at the beginning of her career, which seemed like it would progress straight as an arrow but that instead was abruptly halted with the Nazis’ persecution of th e Jews and the subsequent necessary emigration. Laserstein survived here, later living twelve years in safety in Sweden. She has yet again tried to build a life and a career from the ground up, now under completely different conditions. Time has passed, sh e is older, and she hasn’t seen the friends who were the models for the painting since she left Germany. Even if the circumstances have changed, there may be some parallels between the uncertainty that colors the mood in the earlier painting’s summer evening, where the future for Germany was unclear and the artist’s own uncertain situation in the later portrait. Laserstein is still a painter here, but the hopefulness she exuded so recently as in her first self portrait in Sweden, “Self portrait at the Easel ” (1938), is now overshadowed by the gloom that seems to weigh down her