Judith C. E. Belinfante

Charlotte Salomon

Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943) was a painter from Berlin who fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and spent the last years of her life at her grandparents' home in the south of France. Her grandmother's suicide led Charlotte to paint a dramatized autobiography in an extensive series of gouaches. In this autobiography, all the people that were important to her are brought to life in a special way: her father, her stepmother Paula Lindberg, the singing teacher Alfred Wolfsohn, her fellow students and teachers at the Arts Academy, her grandparents. The original paintings are in the possession of the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam.

Life? Or Theatre?

Evelyn Benesch

Painting For Her Life Charlotte Salomon's artistic feat under the Third Reich When German artist Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943) handed her gouache series Life? or Theater? over to a friend, she beseeched him to "take good care of it, it is my entire life." A few months later, the five-months pregnant Charlotte was picked up by a Gestapo truck, deported to Drancy, and then on to Auschwitz, where she died upon arrival at the age 26. Trauma haunts many of the pages, but there is defiance, too. Born of a family plagued by depression, the work Salomon left behind is, in a very real sense, her pièce de résistance - in her own words, "something wildly eccentric." A cycle of nearly 1,300 autobiographical gouaches, it combines creative force with pioneering personal narrative into one shattering document of self-expression. Divided into three sections, the gouaches unveil a vivid self-portrait spanning across all facets of Charlotte's existence: from a complicated family life, marked by the suicides of nearly all female relatives; growing up in Berlin; her close relation to singing teacher Alfred Wolfsohn; the rise of the Nazis; to her exile to France in 1939. Throughout, the artist challenges these destructive forces by deploying playful pseudonyms and fantastical elements alongside emotional candor, remarkable observation, and a meticulous visual memory.

Judith C. E. Belinfante

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