Lotte Laserstein was born in East Prussia. After her father’s death in 1902, she was raised by her mother and grandmother in present-day Gdańsk and Berlin. In 1927, she graduated from the Berlin Academy of Arts as one of its first female students and soon gained recognition for her portraits of modern women in Weimar Germany.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, her career was cut short as she was classified as “three-quarters Jewish.” In 1937, an invitation to exhibit at Galerie Moderne in Stockholm allowed her to leave Germany. She brought many of her works to Sweden, where she later gained citizenship through a marriage of convenience.

In Stockholm, Laserstein supported herself mainly through portrait commissions but struggled to gain recognition in modernist art circles, as she remained committed to realism. Throughout her life, she painted around 2,000 portraits—depicting both aristocrats and public figures—with a focus on human presence and individuality.

In the 1950s, she moved to Kalmar, where she continued painting portraits, still lifes, and landscapes. Her art was rediscovered internationally in the 1980s, with major exhibitions in London and later Berlin. The renewed interest culminated in recent Nordic retrospectives, including A Divided Life (2023–2024) at Moderna Museet in Stockholm and Malmö.

Laserstein’s work, blending classical technique with quiet modernity, captures the strength and independence of her subjects—always marked by a timeless emotional depth.