Georg Rössner

Georg Rössner (German, 1885–1972).

This work is offered unframed.

An elegant, early 20th century portrait of the influential German fashion designer Lieselotte Friedländer, shown seated in a chrome-steel Bauhaus chair in the style of Kem Weber, with a view beyond through a woodland grove towards blue skies.

Born in 1898, Lieselotte Friedländer moved to Berlin with her family in 1909. By the mid-1920s, she had established herself as the Weimar Republic's most influential fashion designer. Her drawings of elegant, adventurous women soon overflowed Berlin’s cafe landscape to become iconic templates for feminists and the avant-garde worldwide. Friedländer's fashion vision contributed significantly to women’s increasing emancipation in the professions, social activism, sports and self-determined eroticism.

This lyrical study of the fashion designer, shown in her late twenties, was painted by Georg Rössner, who studied in Berlin and Rome and, later, in Paris with Lovis Corinth. Rössner was a member of the committees of both the Berlin and Munich Sezession movements and, in 1920, was appointed professor at Berlin’s State Art School. He exhibited internationally with success including at the 1929 Paris Exhibition des Peintres-Graveurs Allemands and his work is held in prominent private and public collections, including the permanent collection of the National Gallery in Berlin. Georg Rössner’s elegant and powerful portrait of Friedländer is a poignant reminder of both her fleeting beauty and her enduring legacy.

Accompanied by a first-edition copy of "Lieselotte Friedlaender (1898–1973)" by Burcu Dogramaci; published in 2001 by Ernst Wasmuth Verlag Tübingen, Berlin.

Signed lower left