Lou Albert-Lasard

Lou Albert-Lasard was born on 10 November 1885 in Metz, which was then part of the German Empire (now France). Her mother Jenny was American and her father Leopold was a French banker. She grew up extremely sheltered and her parents were very concerned about her education and artistic talents. For her first painting lessons, a painting teacher was specially summoned from Strasbourg, 150 kilometres away, to take care of Lou and her sister Ilse's education.

At the age of 19, Lou Albert-Lasard moved to Munich with her sister Ilse to study painting. Since the state academies did not accept women at that time, the two young women attended drawing courses and private art schools instead. Lou had also discovered the magic of Paris. She travelled regularly to the city on the Seine, where she usually stayed in a studio on Boulevard Raspail.

In 1909, she married the German inventor Dr Eugen Albert from Augsburg in Munich, who invented a photomechanical reproduction process. He was considerably older than she was. Her husband recognised and encouraged her talent, and enabled her to travel extensively and receive an artistic education.

Together they travelled to Paris, Berlin, the South of France, Brittany, Spain, Switzerland and Italy, and Lou captured the impressions in numerous landscape watercolours. A few years after their marriage, their daughter Ingo was born.

In 1912 she began working in Fernand Léger's studio in France, and in Munich she had contact with Alexej Jawlensky, Marianne von Werefkin and the "Blauer Reiter" group. Her favourite subjects remained landscapes, but she also painted portraits often and with pleasure, and she soon earned initial recognition for her technical skill and stylistic independence. Lou Albert-Lasard held one of her first solo exhibitions in 1917 at the Caspari Gallery of the art dealer couple - Georg and Anna Caspari.

The marriage to Eugen existed only on paper in 1914, when Lou met the writer and poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Their shared love of France and concern about the horrors of the outbreak of the First World War united them, and the two soon became lovers. They moved into the Munich Pension Pfanner together and now also inspired each other in their work. Rilke involved Lou Albert-Lasard in his newly founded journal "Das Forum", for which the writers Heinrich Mann and Romain Rolland also wrote. Through Rilke, she got to know numerous artists and writers, whom she often portrayed. Her husband Eugen Albert, however, did not approve of their relationship and divorced Lou as a result. This decision came as a great surprise to Lou, who had underestimated her husband's generosity and indulgence, and who liked to dismiss her relationship with Rilke as a more practical working relationship.

During the First World War, Lou Albert-Lasard travelled to Switzerland again and again. She was particularly fond of Zurich and Ascona. In the village of Ascona, she repeatedly met the artist and friend Arthur Segal, who had fled from Berlin to Switzerland (Ticino) to escape the clutches of war. He had joined the dropouts on Monte Verità - the "Truth Mountain" - a communitarian working and living community with an affinity for art. In the tradition of the life reform movement, many artists and intellectuals found a place to escape modernity, which was associated with acceleration, and to try out alternative models of life (e.g. veganism, nudism, expressive dance) between 1900 and 1920.

Over time, artist friends from Munich joined the small community in southern Switzerland, such as Paul Klee, Alexej Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin. Lou Albert-Lasard's painting therefore continued to move in the context of her Munich artist colleagues and also with a clear influence from Cézanne: her colours became more intense and the form - simplified into patches of colour - subordinated itself. In addition, colour became at the same time a materially perceptible element, it was applied thickly and acquired a haptic quality. Nevertheless, Albert-Lasard never completely lost her connection to representationalism, even though Kandinsky's influence and reference to abstraction played a role in her work at times.

After the end of the war, Albert-Lasard left her circles in Ascona and Munich and went to Berlin, where a large part of her artwork was created. She already had some acquaintances in the city through Rilke. After initially living in Grunewald, she moved into a studio at Nürnberger Straße 4 in 1923, which soon became a meeting place for Berlin's bohemians and various artists and writers. Here she organised city-famous parties for many guests.

She made friends with Dadaists and members of the November Group, with whom she also exhibited. These groups of artists were the image and motor of the social upheaval of the time in the cultural sphere. The painter was in contact with the magazine "Querschnitt", a well-known cultural journal at the time, in which she regularly published prints. In 1922, El Lissitzky organised a large exhibition of Russian artists in the von Diemen Gallery - the "First Russian Art Exhibition". There Lou Albert-Lasard met the artist Marc Chagall, whose portrait she drew.

In 1925, she exhibited her "Montmartre" portfolio at the Flechtheim Gallery (see next chapter). She met the gallery owner Alfred Flechtheim while still in Paris. He enabled Lou to have her largest exhibition to date. In 1921 she showed some works at the Fraenkel Gallery, in 1923 at the Nierendorf Gallery and again and again at the painting school of her long-time friend Arthur Segal.

Her art of this period gives the viewer an impression of life in Berlin during the Weimar years, which meant cultural awakening, new freedoms and artistic experimentation for a small middle class. Albert-Lasard, described as eccentric, can be classified as a representative of the "new woman" type. From the 1920s onwards, these self-confident women were increasingly common: they defied their assigned role as housewife and mother, and claimed new professions for themselves. 

The subjects of Albert-Lasard's paintings attest to the fact that she moved in circles around the vaudeville, theatres, circuses and dance bars of the city. At that time, the revue was booming. The Scala was one of the most famous vaudeville stages in Germany and inspired Lou to create her artwork "Ball in the Scala". The world-famous dancer Josephine Baker also performed in Berlin and was painted by Albert-Lasard. Her artistic style in turn adapted to her strengthened self-confidence. Her formerly quite light colour palette became darker and richer, her patches of colour became more constructive, almost building block-like, building up the painting in strict composition.

In 1928, Lou Albert-Lasard finally moved to Paris. In 1927, her father died, leaving her an inheritance that provided her with the financial means to move. Paris in the late 1920s was still filled with the exuberant choice of diverse pleasures and the intellectual spirit of the cosmopolitan art and literary scene. The private salons, for example those of the Leo and Gertrude Stein siblings, brought together the intellectual elite of an entire generation. This is where the avant-garde thinkers of various disciplines met, discussed their great ideas and plans and inspired each other.

With her "Montmartre" series, in which she captured the Parisian nightlife of the post-war period with verve and frivolity, she secured herself an exhibition at the Galerie Fabre in 1926/27. In Paris, too, she was soon a firm member of the local bohemian scene. The artists Jean Cocteau, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, Robert Delaunay, André Breton, Nathalie Clifford-Barney, Kiki and Thèrése Treize could be counted among her closest circle of acquaintances. In 1933, she was joined by more and more friends who had emigrated from Germany: the writer Mynona, the reporter Egon Erwin Kisch, the Austrian artist Alma Mahler, Julius Maier-Graefe and the writers Lion Feuchtwanger and Franz Werfel. In the beginning, Lou Albert-Lasard was safe in Paris. She undertook major trips, such as to Morocco and Spain in 1934.

From May 1940, people of German and Austrian origin were interned in Paris as "undesirable foreigners", regardless of whether they were Nazi persecutees, emigrants or National Socialists, including Lou and her daughter Ingo. Lou Albert-Lasard and her daughter were rounded up with other women in the Velodrôme d'hiver and taken to the French internment camp Gurs, located at the foot of the Pyrenees.

Fellow inmate Hanna Schramm, a teacher and author, later wrote about Albert-Lasard's daily life in the camp, which she used to capture portraits of her fellow prisoners and scenes from camp life in drawings and watercolours:

"In the summer of 1940 we had seen Lou Albert-Lazard, [...] wandering around with her sketchpad under her arm, looking for models. The women were irritated at first, but then they got used to the 'crazy painter' when she used them, squatting in a corner of the wash barrack, as nude models. This resulted in countless sheets of quickly thrown down, very charming sketches." (Schramm 1977, p. 124)

In August 1940, after the surrender of France on 22 June 1940, Lou and her daughter were able to leave the camp after about three months and return to Paris.

Lou Albert-Lasard travelled extensively with her daughter Ingo: In 1938, for example, they travelled to India, China and Indochina. Despite a walking disability, she even reached Tibet. Climbing the Himalayas became possible with the help of a carrying chair or a horse. As a single woman in the 1930s, travelling meant for her to defy prejudices and social boundaries.

She artistically recorded these places in watercolours, which were very popular with gallery owners. The Charpentier Gallery in Paris immediately set up an exhibition. In her life, Lou Albert-Lasard always had to struggle with many illnesses. Her daughter Ingo supported and nursed her for many years. Lou Albert-Lasard died in Paris on 21 July 1969.

It was not until the 1980s, when a change in the culture of remembrance of National Socialism began in the Federal Republic of Germany and the Second Women's Movement also had an impact in areas such as art, that the artist's story was rediscovered. In 1983, the Berlinische Galerie presented an exhibition entitled "Paintings, Watercolours, Graphic Art" devoted solely to her and her work. The museum had now recognised its task in "rediscovering art" that had been created before National Socialism and "forgotten" afterwards, i.e. socially repressed, which can be understood as the "late consequences of National Socialist cultural barbarism" (see Roters in Gemälde, Aquarelle, Grafik., 1983, p. 7).

Up to this point, Lou Albert-Lasard was known to the culturally interested public only as Rainer Maria Rilke's correspondent and partner/lover. He owed her many artistic impulses and intellectually stimulating conversations. Like so many women who helped to shape the cultural and intellectual life of the time, Lou Albert-Lasard was for a long time only given a supporting role in Rilke's shadow.