An Ambivalent Elegy: Lotte Laserstein's Evening Over Potsdam (1930)

In Evening Over Potsdam, Lotte Laserstein develops a realism in relation to Neue Sachlichkeit(New Objectivity), and through it, she grapples with the alarming political context of Germany in 1930. The stages of the painting's material production and the political landscape of its setting activa...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inArt history Vol. 42; no. 4; pp. 808 - 826
Main Author Schroeder, Kristin
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Oxford, UK Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.09.2019
Subjects
20th century
Art history
History
Interwar period
Laserstein, Lotte (1898-1993)
Modern art
Realism
Weimar Republic
Weimar Germany
Germany
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Summary:In Evening Over Potsdam, Lotte Laserstein develops a realism in relation to Neue Sachlichkeit(New Objectivity), and through it, she grapples with the alarming political context of Germany in 1930. The stages of the painting's material production and the political landscape of its setting activate temporal and spatial shifts, which challenge assumptions that realism is commensurate with a stable and integrated pictorial totality. Prompting a reconsideration of realism's critical function in modern art, this essay employs Ernst Bloch's notion of Ungleichzeitigkeit (non‐contemporaneity, non‐simultaneity, or non‐synchronicity) and Walter Benjamin's dialectical image (a concept originating from his unfinished explorations into historical consciousness) to elucidate Laserstein's abstract handling of time and space in Evening Over Potsdam. In rejecting the stability with which realism has historically been associated, this essay examines the painting's visual displacements and art‐historical quotations to demonstrate how it pictures a crisis of historical consciousness at the end of the Weimar Republic.
ISSN:0141-6790
1467-8365
DOI:10.1111/1467-8365.12461