Lette Valeska Entitled Misery, this 1948-1949 oil on canvas is by German-born photographer, painter, and sculptor Lette Valeska (1885-1985). Forty years after her death at the age of ninety-nine, the work of Jewish painter and photographer Lette Valeska is enjoying a long-overdue resurgence. In 2023, the Braunschweig Museum in Germany mounted a major retrospective of her Hollywood photography and published the first comprehensive monograph on her life and art. The following year, her paintings and photographs were featured in Galka Scheyer and The Blue Four, exhibited alongside masterpieces by Kandinsky, Klee, Feininger, and Jawlensky. The show also inspired a German television feature film chronicling Valeska’s friendship and collaboration with the pioneering art dealer Galka Scheyer (1889–1945). In 2023, her hometown of Braunschweig honored her with a memorial plaque at the site of her childhood home. As an artist, she worked simply under the name “Valeska.” Professionally trained in photography at the Lette-Verein in Berlin and at the École des Beaux Arts in Brussels, she was nevertheless a self-taught painter. Beginning in 1939, encouraged by Scheyer, she developed a distinctive style that merged folk art aesthetics with elements of expressionism and social realism. Her early paintings recalled memories of her childhood in Braunschweig which were rendered in rich colors. She also painted visions of Jewish tradition, faith, and persecution, which she described as arising from a “collective Jewish unconscious.” In a spirit comparable to her near-contemporary Marc Chagall, Valeska fused nostalgia and spirituality in works depicting village life, synagogues, and rabbinical study. She favored imagination over formal technique, working in somber, harmonized palettes with closely clustered figures to convey deep emotional resonance. 1948-1949Oil on Canvas20.75"x24.5" framed, 20.25"x24" unframedSigned and dated lower right. Framed in a wood lath painted black. Fair vintage condition, some small areas of paint missing.
