This painting is, in my view, one of the great paintings of the 20th century. It is a little-known image, yet it deserves to be considered among the very best works of recent art. I must admit to having a particular fondness for the artist who painted it. Her name was Lotte Laserstein; in the painting she is pictured at the easel. For a number of years now I’ve been quietly celebrating her art and the contribution she made to 20th century painting. Early success and Nazi pressures At first glance, it is a standard life study of a nude. Yet the positioning of the artist within the picture does something remarkable: it transforms the painting into a sophisticated commentary on the artist’s own life and, more broadly, on women in modern society at the time of its making. In my Studio was painted by Lotte Laserstein in 1928. The foreground depicts a nude model reclining on a white sheet. In the middle-ground, the artist herself appears at her easel. In the background, snow-covered rooftops of the district of Wilmersdorf in Berlin where Laserstein had her studio. Laserstein lived and worked in Berlin in the era of the Weimar Republic. Largely due to the outcome of World War I, this was a period of political and economic unrest. Yet, somewhat paraxodically, Berlin in the 1920s was also a thriving modern city. Culture and social norms were in flux, and as in other Western countries at the time, the perceived role and status of women was evolving at a pace. In this setting, Laserstein made her way as an artist, declaring from a young age her intention to become a painter and also to never marry. (In 1938 she did marry a Swedish man, Sven Marcus, in order to obtain her Swedish citizenship whilst fleeing from the Nazi regime, but the two never cohabited. Opportunities for exhibiting and selling artwork in Berlin were plenty, but in comparison to men, it still remained difficult for Laserstein to access the art scene fully. It was only in the 1910s, for instance, that women successfully won admission to study at German art schools. Laserstein was one of only a small number of females admitted to the Berlin Academy of Arts at the time. Prospering, she won the academy’s gold medal in 1925, and for the last two years of her training she became the star pupil (Atelier Meisterschüler) of her teacher Erich Wolfsfeld, an honour that entitled her to her own studio. For her income, she gave private lessons in her studio. She sought public recognition by entering competitions and publishing paintings in contemporary illustrated magazines. Her painting style trod a fine and in sophisticated line between modernist realism and the more traditional modes of representation that might lend her work credibility. The art historian Marsha Meskimmon makes a similar reading: seen “within the context in which Laserstein was working during the period, this image is paradigmatic of the problematic relationship between the categories of ‘women’ and ‘artist’ and attempts to find some form which they can be brought together meaningfully.” Yet Laserstein’s promising trajectory as an artist was curtailed after 1935 when the new Nazi racial laws in Germany labelled her “Three-quarters Jewish” and she was barred from exhibiting publicly in her own country. She later had to abandon her studio and for a while scraped together a living as a teacher in a private (and threatened) Jewish school. In 1937, she chose to emigrate to Sweden. In many ways, her enforced emigration meant the end of her avant-garde career. She no longer lived in one of the most vibrant cities in Europe. And after that, she never quite managed to find the same critical significance she achieved in those early years.