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

Art in America, Jan, 1999 by Raphael Rubinstein

In the summer of 1942, the Vichy government decided to arrest all Jewish refugees. Perhaps unaware of the danger, Salomon presented herself to the authorities in Nice. As she was about to board a bus bound for a detention camp, a gendarme turned her away, explaining that she looked too "French" to be imprisoned with foreign Jews. Spared for the moment, Salomon went back to Cap Ferrat, where she composed the epilogue of Life or Theater? She then returned to Nice. In February 1943, her 81-year-old grandfather collapsed in the street and died.

With no place else to go, she moved back clandestinely to Ottolie Moore's deserted villa (Moore had left France in October 1941, for the safety of her native U.S.). Salomon had become romantically involved with a Jewish Austrian refugee named Alexander Nagler and became pregnant with his child. In June 1943, Nagler and Salomon were married in Nice. In September 1943, probably as a result of an informer's denunciation, the Couple fell into the hands of the SS, who took them by truck from l'Ermitage to a Nice hotel which had been turned into a prison. Before she was arrested, Salomon was able to hand the folder containing Life or Theater? to her physician, Dr. Georges Moridis, with the words, "C'est toute ma vie." On Sept. 24, she was sent by train to the Drancy transit camp on the outskirts of Paris and, on Oct. 7, was placed in a transport to Auschwitz. As far as we know, she died in the gas chambers immediately upon her arrival.

In 1947, Albert Salomon and Paula Lindberg-Salomon, who had survived the war hiding in Amsterdam, traveled to Nice to thank the woman who had sheltered their daughter. They found l'Ermitage full of paintings and drawings by Salomon, but Ottolie Moore, who had returned to France after the war, refused to part with any of them. The only thing she was willing to hand over was Life or Theater?, which she had received from Dr. Moridis. Albert and Paula returned to Amsterdam with it, but it took 14 years before the work was finally exhibited (initially at Amsterdam's Museum Fodor, then a branch of the Stedelijk). This show also included paintings and drawings loaned by Moore. After the show they were returned to Moore, who died in 1972, alcoholic and impoverished. L'Ermitage was eventually torn down and all the works of Salomon that had been in her possession vanished without trace.

In 1963, a selection from Life or Theater? was published with an introduction by the noted theologian Paul Tillich. The choice of images played down the theme of suicide, even to the extent of obliterating some of the texts in certain images. In the 1960s and early '70s, the work traveled to exhibitions in Israel and Germany. Upon its return, Albert and Paula donated it to the Jewish Historical Museum, which addressed the problem of establishing the correct sequence of the images. The work was shown in Amsterdam in 1981, the same year the Viking Press edition was published. In the early 1980s, Life or Theater? was seen around the U.S., mostly in Jewish-oriented museums. In 1992, the Pompidou Center mounted a show of the work. Two years later, Mary Lowenthal Feltstiner published the biography which she had been working towards since the late 1970s. To Paint Her Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era brings together an impressive amount of research, including many interviews with surviving family and friends, and a careful and sensitive reading of Salomon's work. As a dramatic and chilling counterpoint to her account of Salomon's life and work, Feltstiner intersperses throughout the book biographical information about the SS officer, Alois Brunner, who was in charge of the forces which arrested Salomon and sent her to her death. (After the war, an unrepentant Brunner escaped to Syria, where he reportedly died in 1993.)