Artwork Title: Abend Über Potsdam/Evening Over Potsdam

Abend Über Potsdam/Evening Over Potsdam, 1930

Lotte Laserstein

Painted in 1930, this monumental composition, Laserstein's masterpiece, looks backwards to art history and forwards to the imminent upheavals of mid-20th-century history at the same time. Raising a secular echo of Da Vinci's The Last Supper, the present work assembles a group of diners along a white-clothed, elongated table, with the young woman at the focal point of the composition in her daffodil-yellow top taking the part of the Christ figure. The remote gazes of the participants in the scene, disengaged as they are one from the other and looking inwards at themselves rather than out at the world, seem to hint at their brooding on the end of something: friendship or peace, perhaps, or the city as they know it. The Last Supper motif is here transposed to a decidedly urban setting, with a topographically-accurate rendition of the Potsdam cityscape laid out for the viewer behind the diners' heads, painted by Laserstein en plein air having taken the two-metre-wide board to the roof-garden by public transport. Laserstein treats the human figures that breathe life into the composition with a palette and technical virtuosity that recall the Neue Sachlichkeit or 'New Objectivity' prevalent in the Weimar period amongst some of the most influential artists of the era, including such masters as Christian Schad. The group of five models used for the figures in Abend über Potsdam were drawn from Laserstein's close circle of friends. One of the sitters, Traute Rose, recalls how the human element of the composition took shape: 'Then the protracted labour began with the various models. My position had been defined on the far left by the balustrade, and so had my husband's, who had our dog at his feet. The central figure was initially a girl in a red jumper, but she couldn't keep it up for long and was replaced by the girl in the yellow shirt. [...] After a while the dog was replaced by an old fur because he obviously didn't like Ernst's feet' (T. Rose, quoted in Krausse, p. 164). The painting remained in Laserstein's possession for the rest of her life, its talismanic presence suggested by its inclusion in the self-portrait she painted in the 1950s, in which it appears behind her. (http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2010/19th-century-european-paintings-including-german-austrian-and-central-european-paintings-the-orientalist-sale-spanish-painting-and-the-scandinavian-sale-l10101/lot.21.html) ...Two years later, Laserstein finished her masterwork, Abend Über Potsdam/Evening Over Potsdam (1930), which shows a group of friends dining on a terrace overlooking the sprawling city under roiling clouds, clearly a stand-in for Germany at large. Again they look away pensively; what should be a scene of pleasure and joy is instead one of ennui and melancholy. Most or all of them, based on real friends - the woman at left, Traute Rose, was a life-long friend and Laserstein’s favorite model — were Jewish and they had plenty of reason to be troubled. Three years after the painting was finished, in 1933, Laserstein was officially classified as “three-quarters Jewish”; her life as a German artist, just begun, also appeared to be finished. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-christie/lotte-laserstein-berlin_b_4351939.html) Abend Uber Potsdam, or Evening Over Potsdam, by German-born artist Lotte Laserstein, stopped me in my tracks when I stumbled across it. It speaks volumes with just a glance. At first, all I could see was a sort of classic Last Supper type arrangement as if painted by Norman Rockwell while he was in the deepest depths of despair. It was big and brilliant. The facial expressions and the body language evoke a mood that is beautiful and tragic at once, perhaps filled with the foreboding of what was to come for these people and that city and that nation. Perhaps the dog, a sleeping German Shepherd, is symbolic of the German people being unaware of what is ahead, an omen of what is lost when a shepherd is not always vigilant. This was painted in 1930, just as the Nazis were beginning to make their fateful move to take over the German government. I can only that imagine someone with keen perceptive powers could easily imagine what might be coming with those dark clouds massing over that German city. (https://redtreetimes.com/2014/03/22/evening-over-potsdam/)
Uploaded on Oct 7, 2017 by Suzan Hamer

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