SALOMON, CHARLOTTE

SALOMON, CHARLOTTE (1917–1943), German painter. The daughter of a Berlin physician, Salomon was sixteen when the Nazis came to power. She refused to continue her schooling because of the humiliations to which she was subjected, but in 1935 she was still able to attend the local Academy of Fine Arts. In 1939 she emigrated to France, where she married another refugee, Alexander Nagler. They lived in relative security until the Germans occupied the Riviera in September 1943, five months after their marriage. Then the Gestapo conducted one of the most brutal mass roundups in Western Europe, during which the young couple were dragged out of their home by the Gestapo, and both died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. While a refugee from Nazi Germany, during 1941 and 1942, Salomon portrayed her life in an autobiography titled Leben oder Theater? Ein Singspiel ("Life or Theater? An Operetta"). It takes the unprecedented form of a musical drama in 1,325 gouaches of astonishing vividness and force, painted in flat, cool colors, with an unusual perspective and a great deal of purely decorative detail. "Life or Theater?" is peopled by characters based on her family and friends, ordered by acts and scenes, narrated by dialogues and commentaries, and accompanied by musical cues. The autobiography makes one family emblematic of its era. Salomon records the creative milieu of Berlin through the experiences of her stepmother, Paula Salomon-Lindberg, a well-known opera singer, and of her mentor and lover, Alfred Wolfsohn, a philosopher of music. The autobiography also registers the impact of Nazism on an assimilated Jewish family: first Charlotte Salomon's grandparents emigrated from Germany, then her stepmother was restricted to performing for Jewish audiences; her father, Dr. Albert Salomon, was deprived of his professorship at the Berlin University Medical School, then imprisoned in Sachsenhausen. Charlotte Salomon was among the handful of Jewish students admitted to the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts, but was expelled in 1938, and left Germany in 1939. Joining her grandparents in Villefranche on the French Riviera, Salomon witnessed her grandmother's suicide in 1940 and only then learned that her mother's death years earlier was also a suicide. The menace of suicide and the duress of exile forced her to decide, she said, "whether to take her own life or undertake something unheard of and mad" – an autobiography in art. After working more than a year on Leben oder Theater?, she gave its paintings and texts to a friend in Villefranche, saying: "Keep this safe. It is my whole life." The paintings often have explanatory captions: one reads, "I cannot bear this life, I cannot bear these times." When a collection of these gouaches was published in 1963 as Charlotte, A Diary of Pictures, Charlotte Salomon came to be regarded as the anne frank of painting. After the war, her father and stepmother brought Life or Theater? to Amsterdam, where it now resides in the Jewish Historical Museum. Exhibitions in Europe, the U.S., and Israel (Beth Hatefutsoth, 1985), as well as published reproductions, a film, and plays, have given Life or Theater? international standing as an artwork, autobiography, and historical document. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: Charlotte: Life or Theater? An Autobiographical Play, intro. by J. Belinfante, G. Schwartz, and J. Herzberg (1981); Charlotte: A Diary in Pictures, intro. by E. Straus (1963); "Charlotte" (film) by J. Herzberg and F. Weisz (1981); Charlotte Salomon – "Leben oder Theater?" Das 'Lebensbild' einer jüdischen Malerin aus Berlin, ed. C. Fiseher-Defoy (for 1986 exhibition, Berlin Fine Arts Academy). ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: J.C.E. Belinfante (ed.), Charlotte Salomon – Leben? Oder Theater? (1994; with catalogue raisonné); M. Lowenthal Felstiner, To Paint Her Life. Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era (1994); E. van Voolen, J.C.E. Belinfante, Charlotte Salomon – Leben? Oder Theater? (Anlaesslich der Ausstellung Charlotte Salomon: Leben? Oder Theater?, Staedelsches Kunstinstitut und Städtische Galerie, Frankfurt am Main) (2004). (Alfred Werner and Mary Felsteiner)