With 5.9 million kronor from a hundred-year-old donation fund, the National Museum has purchased a key work by the German artist Lotte Laserstein. The painting depicts Ilse Amalie Ehrenfried, a German cultural journalist who wrote sharp and humorous texts under the pseudonym "Polly Tieck", a play on the word politics, in the 1920s.
The emancipated woman was Laserstein's motif, and the painting was shown at the exhibition "The Woman of Today" in 1929 in Berlin, says curator Carina Rech at the National Museum.
She was then at the peak of her career.
But Laserstein was Jewish, and the Nazis regarded her paintings as "entartete kunst" (degenerate art). In 1937, she managed to escape to Sweden. Thanks to an invitation to exhibit in Stockholm, she was also able to bring paintings, including "Polly Tieck", which was part of the Modern Museum's recent large exhibition.
I'm incredibly happy that it's now in the National Museum's possession, says Carina Rech.
