Painter and designer Lottie Reizenstein was born into an assimilated Jewish family in Nuremberg, Germany on 9 April 1904; her brother was the composer and pianist Franz Reizenstein. She trained at the local Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts and Crafts), then at the progressive Reimann School of Art and Design in Berlin. Following the rise of Nazism, she fled Germany, following Franz to England in 1936, where she continued her studies at St. Martins School of Art and the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. She also studied later under Oskar Kokoschka in Salzburg, Austria in 1954. She exhibited once with the Women's International Art Club (WIAC) in 1946, and extensively in group exhibitions at Ben Uri Gallery, including in 1949, in 1952 (with the Ben Uri Studio Group, alongside fellow émigrés Klaus Meyer, Bruno Simon and Erich Kahn), 1959 (solo exhibition of paintings of Yugoslavia) and 1970 (with Ruth Collet and Frances Baruch), as well as with the Italian State Tourist Office, London (1960), Galerie Trojanski, Düsseldorf (1966) and the Margaret Fisher Gallery, London (1976). In 1968 in a review of her solo exhibition at her London studio, A. Rosenberg in the AJR (April 1968) remarked, 'Her works affirm the victory of light, form, order and colour over darkness, destruction, anarchy and grey despair'. From 1953 she also embraced design, focusing on modelling, fashion, and embroidery and was a member of the Artists' International Association (AIA), the Hampstead Artist’s Council and the Council of Industrial Design. Reizenstein also worked as an art tutor for London County Council (LCC) and Middlesex County Council (MCC) until 1961, when she transferred to the Marylebone Institute, where she taught until 1974. At the same time, she began teaching art privately in her own studio in College Crescent, Hampstead.
Lottie Reizenstein died in London, England on 1 February 1982 and a memorial exhibition (with Jack Bilbo and Henry Sanders) was held at Ben Uri Gallery in 1983; with a further exhibition with Iris Blain in 1987. Her work is represented in UK public collections including the Ben Uri Collection and the British Museum, London and one of her landscapes is on permanent display in the Franz Reizenstein Room at the Royal Academy of Music.
