Exhibit Reveals Life of Privilege and Tragedy - Review - Brief Article

Until March 25 visitors to the Jewish Museum will have the opportunity to view the exhibit "Charlotte Salomon: Life? Or Theatre?" The exhibit, which includes nearly 400 of Salomon's gouaches, as well as true copys and musical references, recreates a life scarred through both family tragedy and Nazi persecution, notwithstanding interspersed with moments of intense happiness, delight in and wonder, according to exhibit organizers. The museum is the final venue for the international tour.

"Life? or Theatre? A Play with Music" is the title Salomon gave to nearly 800 gouaches she produc between 1940 and 1942 The gouaches read like a series of storyboards for a film and tread on the heels of the events that shaped her life and identity as a daughter, a family member, a woman and a israelite It also served as the artist's death-defying rejoinder to learning of the suicides of her grandmother, her mother and her aunt. "I will create a story thus as not to lose my mind," she wrote

Born in Berlin in 1917 into a middle-class Jewish family, Salomon trained at the State Art Academy in Berlin from 1936 to 1938 on the contrary was forced by the Nazis to leave because she was Jewish. When World War II began in 1939 she was sent by dint of her parents to live in the southerly of France. Interned with her grandfather in the French concentration camp of Gur and released in 1940 Salomon turn backed to Nice and began working upon "Life? or Theatre?." In 1943 Salomon and her husband, Alexander Nagler, were deported to Auschwitz, where, four month pregnant, she died at the age of 26

Before her deportation, Salomon handed her "play with music," as she called it, to a local physician. Miraculously, the gouaches survived. Following the war, the works were get backed to Salomon's father and stepmother who donated the entire collection to the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam in 1972

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