"Life? or Theatre? A Play
with Music, 1940-42," Charlotte Salomon, gouache. Collection of
the Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam, copyright The
Charlotte Salomon Foundation.
Charlotte
Salomon: Life? or Theatre?
NEW YORK CITY - The first exhibition to be shown in New York of
the work of Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943) is on view at The
Jewish Museum through March 25, 2001. Conceived and first shown
at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, "Charlotte Salomon: Life?
or Theatre?" is the first major exhibition in the US detailing
the life of this remarkable yet little-known artist in a
semi-autobiographical narrative.
Before Salomon died in Auschwitz at age 26, she created more than
1,300 gouaches, 769 of which comprise what the artist entitled
"'Life? or Theatre?' A Play with Music."
The exhibit includes nearly 400 of her riveting, small paintings
as well as texts and musical references that illustrate a
fictionalized version of Salomon's short life including moments
of intense happiness and love in the midst of a tragic family
history and Nazi persecution. The Jewish Museum in New York is
the final US venue for this important exhibition, which received
acclaim in its recent showings at the Royal Academy of Arts in
London, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, Canada, and the
Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
All the works in this exhibition have been lent by the Jewish
Historical Museum, Amsterdam, (copyright) Charlotte Salomon
Foundation.
"'Life? or Theatre?' A Play with Music" is the title that Salomon
gave to a sequence of 769 gouaches she produced between 1940 and
1942. The gouaches in this unprecedented series read like
storyboards for a film, following the events that shaped
Salomon's life and her identity as a daughter, a family member, a
woman, and a Jew. It also serves as the artist's death-defying
response to learning of the suicides of her grandmother, her
mother, and her aunt.
Charlotte Salomon. Collection of the Jewish Historical Museum,
Amsterdam, copyright The Charlotte Salomon Foundation.
"I will create a story so as not to lose my mind," Salomon wrote.
Painted with only primary colors (red, yellow, and blue) and
white, and mixing them to create vivid hues, the images are a
fictionalized autobiography, incorporating as "characters"
important and influential individuals in her life. Salomon's
compositions adapt many film techniques including long shots,
close-ups, shifting perspective, cartoon-like registers,
flashbacks, and montage.
The works are structured as scenarios set to specific pieces of
classical, folk, and popular music and are annotated and
intricately woven with narrative. Salomon claimed that tunes
entered her head as she worked and that the painted images became
equivalents for the music that inspired them.
The themes of the works reflect the events that had the greatest
impact on Salomon emotionally; the family history of suicide and
her mother's death in particular, her relationship to her family
and friends, the siege by the Nazis, and her intense love affair
with an older man. Recurring images, such as the window through
which her mother jumped to her death and through which Salomon
perceived life, are central to the paintings.
The work is divided into a prelude, a main section, and an
epilogue, and has a narrator and a cast of more than 20
characters closely based on their real-life counterparts. The
artist's formative years, up until the late 1930s, are covered in
the prelude. This first section includes the suicide drowning in
1913 of Salomon's aunt, but also scenes of her parents meeting,
their courtship, marriage, and wedding night.
The main section contains over half of the paintings and covers
the period from 1937 to 1939. It deals almost exclusively with
Charlotte and her stepmother Paulinka's encounter with the
charismatic singing instructor, Alfred Wolfson, whom Salomon
calls Amadeus Daberlohn. Wolfson was 41 when Salomon met him, and
his ideas about the voice as a direct expression of the human
soul profoundly affected her. His influence over her was
manifold, and he became her first lover.
In this section, Salomon focuses on the complex, often troubled
network of relationships and ideas that develop after he enters
her life. As Daberlohn falls in love with her stepmother, a
highly regarded contralto, he develops a relationship with
Charlotte as well, realizing her aspirations as an artist could
only enhance his own narcissistic greatness as a teacher.
The main section concludes with the horror and aftermath of
Kristallnacht, which precipitates her parents sending Charlotte
to stay with her grandparents in the apparent safety of the
French Riviera. The work's epilogue opens on a richly colored,
positive note. However, the deceptively tranquil Riviera, which
the Nazis called the "perfumed ghetto," soon fails to insulate
Charlotte from both the past and the imminent outbreak of World
War II in September 1939.
Charlotte Salomon was born in Berlin in 1917 into a middle-class
Jewish family. She trained at the State Art Academy in Berlin
from 1936 to 1938, but was forced by the Nazis to leave because
she was Jewish. When World War II began in 1939, she was sent by
her parents to live in the south of France with her grandparents.
Interned with her grandfather in the French concentration camp of
Gurs and released in 1940, Salomon returned to Nice and began
working on "Life? or Theatre?" In 1943, Salomon married Alexander
Nagler, another Jewish refugee, but the Nazis learned of their
whereabouts from the filing of their marriage papers and deported
them to Auschwitz.
Four months pregnant, Salomon was murdered immediately upon
arrival at the concentration camp. Grace Glueck in The New
York Times wrote that the artist defeated oblivion,
"...leaving behind an astonishing work of art that transformed
her life into a poignant opera of paintings, words, and music."
"Life? or Theatre? A Play with Music, 1940-42," Charlotte
Salomon, gouache. Collection of the Jewish Historical Museum,
Amsterdam, copyright The Charlotte Salomon Foundation.
Before her deportation, Salomon delivered her "play with music"
into the trusted hands of a local physician active in the French
Resistance, telling him to "take good care of it; it is my whole
life." Miraculously, the gouaches survived. Following the war,
the works were returned to Salomon's father and stepmother, who
donated the entire collection to the Jewish Historical Museum in
Amsterdam in 1972. "Life? or Theatre?" has been translated into
four languages, made into a book (serving as the exhibition
catalogue), and abridged in several catalogues. It has also
served as the subject of several films, as well as the
inspiration for biographical studies of Salomon.
"Charlotte Salomon: Life? or Theatre?" has been curated by Norman
Rosenthal, Exhibitions Secretary at the Royal Academy of Arts in
London, and Monica Bohm-Duchen, freelance writer and exhibition
organizer. Mason Klein, Assistant Curator of Fine Arts at The
Jewish Museum, has coordinated the exhibition in New York.
An 831-page catalogue, Charlotte Salomon: Life? or
Theatre? accompanies the exhibition. Published by Waanders
Publishers, the book reproduces the entire series of gouaches,
and will be available in paperback in the Museum's Cooper Shop
for $50. Also included are essays by Monica Bohm-Duchen and
Norman Rosenthal.
The Royal Academy of Arts, London, and Antenna Audio have created
an audio guide for "Charlotte Salomon: Life? or Theatre?" which
has been adapted by The Jewish Museum for the presentation in New
York City. Excerpts of some of the musical references cited by
the artist in her work, including Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach,
can be heard as well as Salomon's texts, translated from German
and French, and dramatized by the actress Tilda Swinton.
The Jewish Museum is at 1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street.
Hours are: Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, 11 am to 5:45
pm, and Tuesday, 11 am to 8 pm. For information,
212/423-3200.
