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

Art in America, Jan, 1999 by Raphael Rubinstein

When characters are called upon to deliver monologues, Salomon will draw their features and sometimes their whole body above each phrase of often lengthy texts. For instance, there's a 15-page sequence in which a character offers a discourse on theology and esthetics from a prone position. Salomon not only writes out every word of the speech but draws his elongated body, sometimes with the text actually superimposed over it, 191 times.

Following the Nazi assumption of power in 1933, the careers of both Albert Salomon and Paula Lindberg were abruptly derailed. He was deprived of his professorship and right to practice medicine; she was banned from performing in public and lost her teaching post at the Akademische Hochschule fur Musik. On one page, Salomon depicts a Nazi-led boycott of Jewish-owned businesses and a page from a crudely anti-Semitic newspaper. In order to convey the effect of Nazi "racial" laws on her family, she paints a picture of her father in the operating room and crosses it out, while another image shows a performance of her stepmother being interrupted by a shouting Nazi. Albert Salomon took the only medical job still open to him, as a surgeon at Berlin's Jewish Hospital. That same year, Salomon's grandparents left Germany, first for Rome, later moving to the south of France.

Salomon had begun to sketch in 1932, when she was 15. In 1933, she had to quit school because of the anti-Semitic measures imposed on the German educational system. The same laws also dashed any hope of her attending a university. Banned from receiving a regular education, Salomon was nonetheless able to travel. A trip to Rome is recorded in a number of romantic images, in which one catches glimpses of the Sistine Chapel and Michelangelo's Last Judgment. After her return to Berlin, she enrolled in fashion-design school, one of the few institutions still open to Jewish students. In 1936, she applied to the Berlin Art Academy, which accepted Jewish students as long as their numbers did not exceed 1 1/2 percent of total enrollment. The admissions committee approved her application in the following words: "The artistic abilities of the full Jew Fraulein Salomon are beyond doubt. Her behavior also is recognized to be modest and reserved. There is no reason to doubt her German attitude."

Despite this ominous welcome, Salomon seems to have thrived in art school, which she recalls in a sequence of almost a dozen images. Particular attention is given to her teacher, a serene, kindly looking woman with red hair and a matching coat who challenges and encourages the young Charlotte. Salomon also paints portraits of her fellow students, especially "Barbara," a blonde-haired beauty who became Charlotte's close friend. These languorous, Matissean portraits and the vivid scenes of Italian art that chronicle Salomon's trip to Rome make clear that the atmosphere of mounting persecution and threats in mid-1930s Germany could dampen neither Salomon's sense of beauty nor her awakening sense of an artistic vocation.