A Lesbian Take on Lotte Laserstein

“If your activism is already democratic, peaceful, creative, then in one small corner of the world these things have triumphed… Make yourself one small republic of unconquered spirit.”--Rebecca Solnit
 
German-Swedish, lesbian painter Lotter Laserstein not only made herself that “small republic of unconquered spirit,” but she created a body of work that documents that Amazonian domain. Most remarkable, she did this in Germany during the rise of the Nazi party.
 
Laserstein painted “In My Studio” at the age of thirty. The year was 1928. She had just graduated from the Prussian Academy of Fine Arts. It was a time of uncertainty and also exhilaration. For the first time, women were allowed to attend public art academies. For the first time, women were allowed to attend nude figure drawing classes. For the first time, women were allowed to sport traditionally male haircuts, the “Eton crop” or the “bubikopf.” They were allowed to wear straight-waist dresses and tuxedo jackets. The “Great War” had opened up employment in traditionally male trades and professions. Women had their own money and began to exercise their autonomy in ways that would have been inconceivable to their mothers.

Laserstein wanted the world to see that she had her own studio, a mark of her professionalism and her success—and that it was an impressive one in an upscale residential area of Berlin, with a panoramic, rooftop view.  She was a brilliant painter, had begun to rack up impressive credentials, and she was not afraid to flaunt it. To be absolutely clear, Laserstein titled the work “In My Studio.” She had, at thirty, achieved not only a room of her own, but a studio no less.
 
And what was happening in this studio of hers? No less than a miracle. Laserstein is painting a female nude, the traditional subject of centuries of male artists. An internet image search for “odalisque” will turn up hundreds of images of reclining female nudes. According to art historian Joan DelPlato, “By the eighteenth century the term odalisque referred to the eroticized artistic genre in which a nominally eastern woman lies on her side on display for the spectator.”

Laserstein was taking one of the most popular tropes in Western art history and subverting it and appropriating it to a lesbian and feminist context. A meticulous and classically trained painter, she executed numerous studies for this painting before settling on this precise position for the model. Fifty years later, Traute Rose could still recall her discomfort: “… the pose was very difficult to hold. Nevertheless, I held on because I saw it develop into a true masterpiece.” Where male painters would lasciviously or puritanically cache the pudendum in folds of fabric or behind a lifted thigh, Laserstein features her lover’s mons in full frontal nudity as the focal point of the painting, locating it at the intersection of two diagonals: one established by Rose’s body and the other by Laserstein’s oblong palette.
 
And what about this model? Her name is "Traute Rose," and was a model noted for an athletic and androgenous physique. Laserstein not only told people that Traute was her favorite model, but their intimacy is the subject of a number of her paintings... paintings that the artist would refer to as collaborations between her and Rose. In a letter to Rose in 1956, Laserstein was describing a painting of a nude that she was then working on, noting that it was “far from being as good as ours.” The relationship between male painters and the female nude models has historically been hierarchical, with the dominance of the painter made explicit in the paintings where they appear together.  Lasertein’s portraits of Rose bear witness to their mutuality and the trust between them. They appear to share an artistic investment in the painting. It is not a commercial relationship.

The term “male gaze” was coined from feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey’s watershed essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," published in 1971.  Since then, it has become a well-known and widely discussed theory. In the essay, Mulvaney argues that classical Hollywood cinema placed the spectator in a masculine and heterosexual subject position, where the figure of the woman on screen was depicted as an object of desire. In this era of cinema, the protagonists were overwhelmingly male and audience members, regardless of sex, were encouraged to identify with them... that is, to adopt the "male gaze."  The female charactes in these films  were coded with "to-be-looked-at-ness," objects of male voyeurs and fetishists. This "male gaze" informs most portraits in the traditional canon where naked women are the subject. Laserstein was challenging this head-on, with a "take no prisoner" attitude in these paintings of Rose.

The figure of Rose in "In My Studio" has been referred to by art critics as monumental. She sprawls across the foreground, and there is absolutely no attempt to titillate the spectator with partial concealment with drapery. The model is lost in her own thoughts, or perhaps asleep. There is no "come hither" expression. Her face is turned toward Laserstein, not us. Traute Rose, with her small breasts, her “Eton bob,” her lack of makeup, and her large and muscular hands, defies the expectations of "the male gaze."

Laserstein foregrounds these hands and the gender non-conformity of Rose in her painting "The Tennis Player."