Charlotte Salomon: A Visual Testament - exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London, England

Art in America, Jan, 1999 by Raphael Rubinstein

Using a dazzling variety of pictorial techniques and narrative strategies, Charlotte Salomon, who was killed by the Nazis at age 26, told the story of her suicide-prone family and her own romantic and artistic struggles. An exhibition devoted to her work is on view at London's Royal Academy until mid-January.

Since it was first revealed to the world in 1961, Charlotte Salomon's 1941-42 serial work of more than 700 autobiographical gouaches titled Life or Theater? has been exhibited, at least partially, throughout Western Europe and in Israel and Japan. Until Jan. 17, half of Life or Theater? is on view in London, at the Royal Academy of Arts. Over the years, the work has been written about repeatedly, and has even inspired a movie and a play. Yet, Salomon--who died in Auschwitz in 1943 at the age of 26--has remained surprisingly little known as an artist, particularly in the United States. The reasons for this include her marginalization as a "Holocaust artist" and the fact that practically her entire oeuvre is in the hands of a single historical institution and thus removed from the publicity-generating activities of the art market. In the early 1980s, the appearance of a volume devoted to her work and a limited U.S. exhibition tour did a little to lift the veil of obscurity. This was followed by the publication, in 1994, of Mary Lowenthal Feltstiner's full-scale biography of the artist, To Paint Her Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era, which made available to American readers the details of Salomon's story.[1] But even this book didn't do the trick. In an informal poll conducted as I began writing this article, I mentioned Salomon's name to a dozen colleagues and only two of them recognized it.

My own discovery of Salomon's work occurred more or less by chance during a 1995 visit to the Jewish Historical Museum of Amsterdam. Along with extensive displays documenting the largely vanished Jewish community in Holland, the museum, which is the repository for Salomon's work, always has a portion of Life or Theater? on display. Even in a limited selection that mixed some of the actual gouaches with color reproductions of others, I found Salomon's work immediately compelling. Since then, I've been able to consult not only Feltsteiner's biography and a catalogue published by the Jewish Historical Museum, but also the 1981 Viking Press volume which reproduces in color nearly the entire series.[2]

Salomon's vivid images make their narrative qualities immediately felt, even if it takes some time to sort out the stories being told. The gouaches, each of which measures roughly 13 by 10 inches, offer glimpses of everyday life such as family dinners, busy classrooms, weddings, street scenes and lovers embracing, but there are also numerous symbolic images in which disembodied heads swirl through the air or a window opens onto a void. The figures that populate these compositions owe much to German Expressionism--the elongated bodies and limbs echo Nolde, the compacted urban scenes recall Kirchner and some of the close-up views of single figures evoke Kokoschka's portraits--but Salomon leavens these northern influences with lush color, sensuous patterning and figures of graceful, glowing youths that suggest she also looked at French painters such as Matisse, Vuillard and Dufy.

In addition to its visual-art influences, Life or Theater? (Leben? oder Theater? in Salomon's original handwritten German) is also, as its title announces, deeply beholden to the dramatic arts. Salomon subtitled her work a singespiel, referring to the German operetta tradition in which spoken lines were mixed with lyrics sung to tunes borrowed from various sources. Accordingly, Salomon indicates that many of the lines given to the characters of Life or Theater? are set to specific tunes (from Bizet, Mozart and Bach, as well as to more humble melodies taken from folk songs and popular music). As if the reader were settling into a theater seat, Salomon begins her work with a page introducing the cast of characters. These number about a dozen and have been identified by commentators as the family members and friends who most affected Salomon. One soon realizes that the series essentially presents a thinly disguised biography of the Salomon family.

The story Life or Theater? tells is doubly tragic. It follows the mounting personal disasters of the self-destructive Salomons, and Charlotte's attempts to understand and escape, while also bearing witness to the closing net of the Holocaust in which its creator will eventually be caught. Given the extremely close parallels between the narrative of Life or Theater? and the events in Salomon's life, it's feasible to follow them more or less simultaneously. Indeed, Life or Theater? seems in its very title to encourage the intermingling of art and life.

The tale begins in 1913, four years before the artist's birth, when her mother's 18-year-old sister, Charlotte Grunwald (called Charlotte Knarre in Life or Theater?) drowned herself. The second image shows the dead girl floating in a coffinlike form alongside her grieving family. The center of the composition is taken up by a text panel dispassionately describing the incident. (Text abounds in this work--the first 218 images are accompanied by overlaid tracing paper containing written narration and dialogue; for subsequent pages the text is written directly onto the paintings.) Succeeding this grim opening are images showing the courtship and marriage of Charlotte's parents, physician and professor Albert Salomon and Franziska Grunwald (they are called Albert Kahn and Franziska Knarre). Charlotte marks her own appearance by depicting a birth announcement card for "Charlotte Kahn." She surrounds it with a heart-shaped design, suggesting a loving family's happiness at her birth.