Vita
“She [Lilo Rasch-Naegele] can hardly remember a time without brush and pencil.”
ARAL-Journal, 1958

Lilo Rasch-Naegele is born as Liselotte Margarete Naegele on December 12 in Stuttgart. She is the third daughter of Rosa, née Nägele, and Karl Alfons Naegele, a painter with an apartment and studio at Marienstrasse 28 in Stuttgart, who died in 1927.

From April 1922 Lilo attended the Catholic High School for Girls in Stuttgart, which she left at the age of 15 in March, 1930. Following this she took drawing lessons at the Städtische Gewerbeschule im Hoppenlau (vocational school), Stuttgart.

Lilo began a drawing traineeship with the advertisement firm Carl Markiewicz in Stuttgart until 1931.

Lilo studied at the Württembergische Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule Stuttgart (Württemberg State School of Arts and Crafts) – as a degree student in the Graphic Department, where she was greatly influenced by her teacher, F. H. Ernst Schneidler, founder of the 'Stuttgart School' in the field of graphic design.

In the early 1930s Lilo moved to Reinsburgstraße 38, Stuttgart, where she had her own drawing studio. She was a much sought-after book illustrator, press- and fashion illustrator for well known publishing houses and textile firms (among others Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, Stuttgarter Neues Tagblatt, Gröber-Neufra).

Lilo designed the showcase for Hugo Benner, the celebrity hair stylist in the Stuttgart Wilhelmsbau building. This made her known to the city’s circle of intellectuals around the architects Heinz and Bodo Rasch who, together with Richard Döcker, were advocating the cause of putting the Bauhaus ideals into practice. Other patrons were the Hölzel students Willi Baumeister and Lily Hildebrandt who was closely connected to Walter Gropius, as well as her husband Professor Hans Hildebrandt, art historian and a pioneer of Classic Modernism through his publishing work.

Lilo worked as a press illustrator in Berlin for the magazines "Die Dame" and "Die Neue Linie", and for the film company Tobis-Filmgesellschaft

Lilo und Bodo Rasch marry. Born to them were their daughter, Aiga Rasch, and their son, Bodo Rasch.

Directly after the end of the war Lilo returned to her studio at Reinsburgstraße 38 and continued with her successful illustration work from the pre-war years. She experienced a great demand for her commercial artwork in product advertising and book illustration. Her artistic style of portraying the consumers’ world, represented by fashion, cosmetics, luxury food, household in general and automobiles, captured the “Lebensgefühl”, the approach to life in the 1950s, which seemed to be characterized by elegance and sense of style and which is regarded as the “rococo” of the post war era.

As one of few women, Lilo was again part of the artistic and intellectual circle around Professor Willi Baumeister. They would gather at the Stuttgart “Bubenbad”, rather a men’s pub at the time: art historians Herbert Herrmann and Hans Hildebrandt; the art critic and poet Kurt Leonhard; philosopher Max Bense; the publishers Albrecht Knaus and Gerd Hatje; painters Alfred Eichhorn, Cuno Fischer and Peter Jakob Schober; the silk screen printer Luitpold Domberger; the photographer Adolf Lazi; the product designers Wilhelm Wagenfeld and Hans Warnecke; and the psychiatrist Ottomar Domnick, a dedicated advocate of contemporary art, with his collection (and later presentation at his own residence) setting standards.

Lilo and her family moved to Oberaichen, Wispelwald, where Bodo Rasch had designed a modern villa. The living space and her studio became what she called her “art factory”. It marked the beginning of a new creative period where Lilo mainly experimented with oil painting, testing all possibilities from glaze to impasto, including the use of sponge, spatula and template. One of her stylistic devices was the “effaçure”, her own creation,  derived from the French word effacer (= to smudge, remove). Notwithstanding these experiments, drawing and illustration continued to play an important part and she left an extensive oeuvre of graphics and prints.
The theme of the female figure is notably consistent throughout Lilo’s œvre; woman in her ambivalent role as both seductive Eve and protective mother. From the mid 1960s Lilo turned her attention to visual themes which made her a chronicler of her times. Her late works include many inspirations from the Arab world.
Through numerous solo and group shows since 1949 Lilo became well known both in the Stuttgart area, and nationwide and her works were shown in Paris (1960), Vevey (1965), Athens (1967) and Manosque in the South of France (1973).

Lilo worked for a number of companies as a commercial artist, amongst others for Graphia, Marburger Tapetenfabrik, Dura, Osram, Rau, Schiesser (exclusive contract 1957-1961), Sarotti, Werbebau, Salamander, Daimler-Benz, Aral, Bosch, Philipps, Dujardin, shaping the look and feel of their marketing presence.
She did book and press illustrations for publishing houses such as Boje, Frankh, Ueberreuther, Hoch, Desch, Bertelsmann, Schuler, Köhler, Henri Nannen Verlag, dva, as well as Stuttgarter Zeitung, Badische Zeitung, Aral-Journal.

Lilo died suddenly and unexpected on June 3 in Oberaichen.