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

Using a dazzling variety of pictorial techniques and narrative strategies, Charlotte Salomon, who was killed through the Nazis at age 26 told the story of her suicide-prone family and her possess romantic and artistic struggles. An exhibition devot to her work is upon view at London's Royal Academy until mid-January.

Since it was first revealed to the world in 1961 Charlotte Salomon's 1941-42 serial work of more than 700 autobiographical gouaches titled Life or Theater? has been exhibited, at least partially, completely through Western Europe and in Israel and Japan. Until Jan. 17 half of Life or Theater? is upon view in London, at the Royal Academy of Arts. above the years, the work has been written about repeatedly, and has flat inspired a movie and a play. notwithstanding Salomon--who died in Auschwitz in 1943 at the age of 26--has remained surprisingly little known as an artist, particularly in the United States. The reasons for this include her marginalization as a "Holocaust artist" and the fact that practically her entire oeuvre is in the hands of a single historical institution and thus remov from the publicity-generating activities of the art market. In the early 1980 the appearance of a turn devoted to her work and a limited U exhibition tour did a little to lift the veil of obscurity. This was followed through the publication, in 1994, of Mary Lowenthal Feltstiner's full-scale biography of the artist, To Paint Her Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era, which made available to American readers the details of Salomon's story.[1] on the contrary even this book didn't do the trick. In an informal head conducted as I began writing this article, I mentioned Salomon's name to a dozen colleagues and sole two of them recognized it.

My hold discovery of Salomon's work occurr more or les by means of chance during a 1995 visit to the Jewish Historical Museum of Amsterdam. Along with extensive displays documenting the largely vanished Jewish community in Holland, the museum, which is the repository for Salomon's work, always has a portion of Life or Theater? upon display. Even in a limited selection that mixed a certain quantity of of the actual gouaches with color reproductions of others, I base Salomon's work immediately compelling. Since then, I've been able to confer not only Feltsteiner's biography and a catalogue published by the agency of the Jewish Historical Museum, on the contrary also the 1981 Viking Pres convolution which reproduces in color nearly the entire series.[2]

Salomon's vivid images make their narrative qualities immediately felt plane if it takes some time to sort on the outside the stories being told. The gouaches, each of which measures roughly 13 through 10 inches, offer glimpses of everyday life of the like kind as family dinners, busy classrooms, weddings, highway scenes and lovers embracing, on the contrary there are also numerous symbolic images in which disembodied heads swirl from one side the air or a window lay opens onto a void. The figures that populate these compositions owe a great deal of to German Expressionism--the elongated bodies and limbs reflected sound Nolde, the compacted urban pageants recall Kirchner and some of the close-up views of single figures call forth Kokoschka's portraits--but Salomon leavens these northern influences with lush color, sensuous patterning and figures of graceful, glowing youths that put in mind of she also looked at French painters like as Matisse, Vuillard and Dufy

In addition to its visual-art influences, Life or Theater? (Leben? oder Theater? in Salomon's original handwritten German) is also, as its title announces, deep beholden to the dramatic arts. Salomon subtitled her work a singespiel, referring to the German operetta tradition in which nuncupative lines were mixed with lyrics sung to melodys borrowed from various sources. Accordingly, Salomon indicates that many of the lines given to the characters of Life or Theater? are station to specific tunes (from Bizet, Mozart and Bach, as well as to more submissive melodies taken from folk lays and popular music). As if the reader were settling into a theater seat, Salomon begins her work with a page introducing the cast of characters. These number about a dozen and have been identified through commentators as the family members and friends who greatest in quantity affected Salomon. One soon realizes that the series essentially at hands a thinly disguised biography of the Salomon family.

The story Life or Theater? take an account ofs is doubly tragic. It tread on the heels ofs the mounting personal disasters of the self-destructive Salomons, and Charlotte's attempts to understand and escape, while also bearing witness to the closing trap of the Holocaust in which its creator will eventually be caught. Given the extremely shut up parallels between the narrative of Life or Theater? and the occurrences in Salomon's life, it's feasible to come [i]or[/i] go after [i]or[/i] behind them more or less simultaneously. Indeed, Life or Theater? strike one as beings in its very title to encourage the intermingling of art and life.

The tale begins in 1913 four years before the artist's birth, when her mother's 18-year-old sister, Charlotte Grunwald (called Charlotte Knarre in Life or Theater?) suffocate in watered herself. The second image present to views the dead girl floating in a coffinlike form alongside her grieving family. The center of the composition is taken up by dint of a text panel dispassionately describing the incident. (Text abounds in this work--the first 218 images are accompanied by the agency of overlaid tracing paper containing written narration and dialogue; for later pages the text is written directly onto the paintings.) Succeeding this grim opening are images showing the courtship and marriage of Charlotte's parents, physician and professor Albert Salomon and Franziska Grunwald (they are called Albert Kahn and Franziska Knarre). Charlotte marks her hold appearance by depicting a birth announcement card for "Charlotte Kahn." She environs it with a heart-shaped design, suggesting a loving family's happiness at her birth.