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The year was 1959. The exact date is no longer known. In Amsterdam, an old man carried three red boxes through the gate into the Stedelijk Museum. Inside them were many hundreds of identically-sized gouaches, 25 by 32.5 cm. On that day, Dr. Albert Salomon had little reason to imagine that his daughter’s paintings would so excite museum director Willem Sandberg; or that within two years Ad Petersen would curate an exhibition at the museum (or more exactly at the Fodor Museum which was then an Amsterdam branch of the Stedelijk) that would begin, albeit hesitantly, an international Juggernaut of artistic acclaim; or that after a decade it would be recognized as one of the rare phenomena of modern times.

1962: Charlotte Salomon’s paintings arrive in Israel for a modest exhibit at Beit Dizzengoff in Tel Aviv (rather than the more prestigious Helena Rubenstein Building) and at the Jewish Art Center in Ein Harod. In the aftermath of Adolf Eichmann’s capture, Salomon’s paintings took on a special resonance, but they were also shadowed by the stereotype of “Holocaust art.”

Charlotte Salomon was twice a Holocaust victim. Once was when her own life was “showered” away in Birkenau, in early October 1943. The second time was when the Holocaust gnawed at her art: despite all efforts to wrest the genius of her project Life? Or Theater? from the dominion of the Holocaust, and despite many efforts to position her 1,325 paintings in the context of modern art as they deserve, the dead hand continues to exert its grip. So although Charlotte Salomon’s art won fame around the world through numerous books, articles, and papers, and especially in exhibits at some of the finest museums of East and West (for example, the Pompidou Center in Paris, 1992, and the Royal Academy of Art in London, 1997) – she remained labeled the victimized Jew, pigeonholed as “art’s Anna Frank.” When the Amsterdam Jewish Museum took charge of her paintings in 1972, certainly she was further ghettoized and sentimentalized in the public consciousness, leading for example to her large exhibit at the New York Jewish Museum (2001) rather than the Museum of Modern Art which is forty blocks to the south.

The paintings of Life? or Theater? are not Holocaust art, even though the shadow of Nazism falls into them. Nor are they a tragic humanistic “testimony” from the artistic sidelines. What may look initially like the art brut of an outsider artist – that is, an authentic/primitive artistic expression that ignores the history of art, the language of modernism, etc., is only deceptive: At the age of 24, Charlotte Salomon, painting in Villefranche, southern France, at the villa of Ottilie Moore (who in fact bought paintings from her) was an educated, diplomaed artist, with avant-garde leanings and experience, and her work is a top-grade expressionist achievement.

Eight years earlier, as a 16-year-old, impressed by Michelangelo’s “Judgment Day” and “Creation of Man” at the Vatican, she had begun her art studies with private lessons in drawing, and within two years she had been accepted to the Combined Academy of Free and Useful Arts in Berlin. There, at an institute bringing together crafts and fine arts in the spirit of the Deutschen Werkbund, Salomon studied for two and a half years, until 1938 – first under Ernst Bohm, a graphic designer; and later under Ludwig Barting, an artist who encouraged the drawing of garden flowers and the illustration of texts. Salomon won a distinction award from the Academy.

One must recall that in those days Nazi Germany forbade the modern style and denounced expressionism as decadent Bolshevik-Jewish art. Though the Academy’s library may have included a few books of “decadent” art, modernist teachers were fired. In other words, Salomon did not develop out of expressionist training. (The bit of her art that remains from that period reveals a rather limited lyrical romanticism with a love/death motif.) However, the art books of her parental home, the theater, the cinema and music sponsored by the Kulturbund – Jewish cultural organization (presented at the synagogue, under the artistic management of Kurt Singer, a friend of Salomon’s stepmother and formerly manager of the Berlin Opera), and above all the avant-garde artists and intellectuals who frequented the Salomon family parlor – Erich Mendelssohn the architect, Paul Hindemith the composer, Max Liebermann the artist, Albert Einstein, Albert Schweitzer, Leo Baeck, and others – all provided a cultural grounding in free-ranging thought and advanced, sophisticated creativity. It should also be noted that Salomon was raised in an artistic home (her stepmother, Paula Lindberg-Salomon, being a singer involved in experimental projects) and in the advanced Berlin environment (still carrying the impact of Bauhaus, the new objectivism, political theater, expressionist cinema, polyphonic music, etc.). More than a small echo of such spirits of artistic progress can be found in Charlotte Salomon’s paintings. Indeed this was no naïve art.

The series called Life? Or Theater?, created in approximately two years of obsession, including 18 months of great loneliness and unsteady nerves (1941-1942) might also help explain the expressionistic language that Salomon employed (strong feeling, directness, no mediation). And it is difficult not to recall another artist, Van Gogh, who also during two important years in southern France, brought to bear his loneliness and his mental condition. Accounts of Salomon’s Villefranche days tell of tireless work, day and night, sometimes with neither food nor sleep, a process governed by powerful impulse and inner necessity that erase the boundary between art and life. It is similarly difficult not to see the language of distortion, the lengthened limbs, the flattening, the primitivism, and the spontaneity as an inclination in the direction of the art of Kirchner, Nolde, Kokoschka, Munch – that is, German expressionism and its Northern roots. Also worth mentioning, in this context, is the affinity to medieval art (a familiar German expressionist affinity), if only for the narrative integration of several scenes on the same surface. However, Salomon never worked under the lamp of the expressionists of the “Bridge” tradition (1906-1914). In her, modernistic openness joined with a bold authentic expression that was temporarily shaken by a series of traumas: the fear-stricken move from Berlin to southern France in 1939, the outbreak of war, the short confinement to a concentration camp in the Pyrenees, the conquest of France, the revelation that her mother committed suicide (when Salomon was nine) rather than dying of influenza, the suicide of her grandmother (with whom, and with her grandfather, she stayed in Villefranche). These formed the emotional background for the feverish outburst of art, in accordance with the local doctor’s recommendation that she should occupy herself with painting for the sake of crisis therapy. Indeed, the words with which Salomon described the creative experience (near the start of Life? or Theater?) indicate an unconscious process and an irrational self-devotion to the mental state: “Consider that the pictures were created like this: A person is sitting by the sea. He is drawing. A tune repeats in his mind. When he begins to hum it, he notices that the tune exactly fits the drawing on the paper. A text forms in his mind, and he begins to sing the tune aloud with the words, over and over, until the drawing is finished.” By some testimony, Salomon had the habit of humming songs as she worked on her pictures. To paraphrase Nietzsche (on the Bacchantes) “the painting is born from the spirit of music;” or, in Walter Benjamin’s terminology, “the moment of awakening” between dream and waking.

From Alfred Wolfsohn, her first love, Salomon deliberately adopted the principle of an unconscious creativity associated with a soul in liberation. He was a musician, her elder by 22 years (and the voice trainer of the Jewish Kulturbund). Wolfsohn, a close friend of the Salomon family, strongly encouraged Charlotte Salomon’s art and even had her illustrate his writings. In Life? or Theater? Salomon describes Wolfsohn’s artistic theories at length – “Orpheus, or the Way to the Death Mask.” “The singer does not sing the song; on the contrary, the song is sung through him,” she quotes Wolfsohn in her paintings. Yet, more than she internalized the covenant of the soul and of creativity, Salomon internalized Wolfsohn’s ideas of the centrality and essentiality of death both in life and in art: Wolfsohn, who was wounded and pronounced dead during World War I, and from under a pile of bodies experienced the sounds of his dying comrades, developed a half-mystical theory linking voice, soul, death, and redemption. “Between life and death, there must be an intermediate state of great concentration which may be filled with poetry,” says Wolfsohn/Daberlohn in one of the Life? Or Theater? paintings. Salomon accepted Wolfsohn’s idea that in order to experience life at its full power, a person must once die and suffer; that is, a person must return from among the dead. Note that her Daberlohn creates a sort of death-mask of himself, and while the wax is pressing on his face he experiences a mixture of colors and sounds. When the mask is finished, he thinks of Orpheus, who returns to Hades in order to save his beloved Eurydice by his playing. This seems to be the credo for Salomon’s creative work. Indeed, she describes her work as a way of standing up against death and defeating it by creativity. For her, salvation means the obviation of suicide. In the spirit of Wolfsohn’s ideas, she wrote: “She needed to disappear from the world of human life for a while and to sacrifice everything in order to create her world anew from the abyss.”

The pairing of life and death was a destiny branded harshly onto the Salomon family heritage: six of her family had committed suicide; and Charlotte Salomon’s own personality is known to have been depressive. She carried on a romance with death throughout her oeuvre. Characteristically, Life? or Theater? begins with a death (the suicide of an aunt, the mother’s sister, by drowning in a lake); it continues with the suicide of Franziska, the mother, who leaps from a window; and it ends with a death (the suicide of the grandmother, by hanging). It is as if, transforming the death force that pulsed within and around her, Salomon had fashioned a force of life and creativity: a somewhat Schopenhauerian approach. “I will create a story in order to not to lose my mind,” Salomon wrote in a letter to her parents. In an article in “Collapse,” 1999 (Archive of the Jewish Museum, Amsterdam), Christine Connelly considered Charlotte Salomon’s work in terms of the German Baroque “mourning play” that interested Walter Benjamin: her work too is a vision of history as tragic drama. Shelley Horenstein in a 1998 article (Archive of the Jewish Museum, Amsterdam) analyzed Salomon’s work in terms of a feminine-ornamental mourning ritual (veil; feminine decorative embroidery; no center, no margin) which she discerns in the painter’s picturesque language. In any case, Life? or Theater? is a work of mourning in that it revisits the trauma of loss.
In the dialectic of life/death/life, the heroic mission of art demanded a work from Salomon in a medium that would extend beyond painting. The plastic, spatial medium needed to integrate with musical/dramatic time. Ernst van Alphen asserted in a 1993 article (Archive of the Jewish Museum, Amsterdam) that Salomon overcomes trauma by integrating the “traumatic memory” (dramatic by nature) with the “narrative memory” in a unified plastic art. Indirectly quoting Richard Wagner on the idea of “total artwork” (Gesamtkunstwerk), Salomon’s work brings together various artistic media. Already on the third page of Life? or Theater? she defines her work as “a three-color game with music.” Indeed the work combines painting (red, blue, and yellow, the three primary colors of the Bauhaus – but without the mechanistic rationalism of that avant-garde school), actors, texts, music, and cinema. It is a kind of opera (with a possible affinity to Weber’s Der Freischutz, an opera that pits life against death; a certain folk song is quoted both in that opera and alongside the mother’s suicide and the skeleton’s appearance in Salomon’s pictures), or a Singspiel – a pre-operatic musical-theatrical medium that originated in the 18th century and included dialogues, folk songs, and a certain comical factor.

Thus the paintings of Life? or Theater? are paintings of autobiographical theater, describing Salomon’s life from 1913-1940. A thread of comedy is interwoven with lyricism and tragedy, with Salomon’s “actors” from time to time speaking in banal, comic rhymes. Her figures are all disguised: herself, she becomes Charlotte Kann ('can' in German); and she gives her parents and family friends new names, some associated with music: the grandmother and grandfather become Mr. & Mrs. Knarre ('rattling sound' in German), the father becomes Albert Kann, the mother becomes Paulinka Bimbam, and Wolfsohn, as mentioned above, becomes Amadeus (hinting at the centrality of Mozart in the Salomon home) Daberlohn. In Salomon’s work, one can even see a painterly version of Brecht’s “Epic Theater” (which itself drew from the theatrical experiments of 1920s Germany): switching and alteration of points of view; intervention of the narrator; the insertion of the quoted songs that break the sequence of events and provide an alienating effect. As Mary Felstiner notes in her book, Salomon had been familiar with Brechtian Theater since her studies at the Bismarck school in Berlin.

The theater is interlaced with music. Salomon’s characters “sing” one by one, in duets and in chorus, alongside references to classical and popular musical themes: German folk songs, Bizet’s Carmen, Gluck’s Orpheus, the melodies of J.S. Bach, film themes. But note, that is all in the first part of the work – as if Salomon no longer felt the need later.

So there is theater, there is music, now let us consider text. “This may be the outstanding textual artwork of the whole twentieth century up to conceptual art,” wrote Raphael Rubinstein (Art in America, January 1999). Life? or Theater? combines representations and text, at first by writing on transparent paper (which covers the pictures) and later by writing inside the picture. The nearer we approach the end of the work, the more dominant the text becomes. Crowded writing fills whole pages without any portraiture, and the writing becomes obsessive, panicked; the lines run in nervous waves, up to the closing illustration: Charlotte, her back to us, sitting like a siren on the beach. In her hand we see a brush and paper, and she is painting. Across her back is written: Life or Theater. Unlike the question-marked version at the front of the series, the two concluding nouns no longer carry doubt: by now, theater and life have become one, as sort of answer from Charlotte to herself. Her personal theater is her life, and its performance is her way of surviving.

Words, music, theater, cinema: Daberlohn/Wolfsohn believes that cinema is a tool whereby one can create oneself anew, by entering within oneself and by leaving oneself behind. And the medium of cinema has an important role in Life? or Theater? Salomon switches perspective as if repositioning a movie camera, and she alternates among long shots and close-ups, zooming in and out. Sometimes the page is divided into three frames indicating three successive phases. Sometimes Salomon even uses cinematic shock conventions. In response to the mother’s suicide, the grandmother rises from the table, she looks from the window, and then Franziska’s body fills the entire space.

Despite all her obsession and her devotion to the “soul,” Salomon retained complete artistic awareness. Her work follows a strict structure, announced already on the second page. Thus, over and above the numbering of the paintings, there is a classic division into three parts: prologue (Vorspiel), middle (Haupteil), and epilog (Nachwort). At the same time, and despite the careful structure, a colorful unconscious drive asserts itself over the progress of the work, and a significant change of form distinguishes the end from the beginning. In the later pictures, no longer are several scenes brought together onto one page. Instead, the page is devoted to a single moment, a single scene, at a higher level of abstraction, the figures becoming more symbolic. The feverish obsession has become the driving force: the multiplicity of the sentences takes charge and demands a multiplicity and separation of the figures, which are replicated at a furious pace. Daberlohn/Wolfsohn is often represented now by replication of his head alone (as the one who is thinking). As his lectures are illustrated, Daberlohn is even shown many times over as a reclining figure, and the result is a compression of abstract horizontal symbolism. These passages of unmediated symbolism, erasing the boundary between manuscript and drawing, and between consciousness and external representation, seem to be the peak passages of bold artistic originality for the whole series.

What begins monochromatically, with dark bluish and reddish shades that stifle the paper, ends with bright pages, the white of the paper as the background for figures and texts colorfully sketched. The activeness of the early paintings (with figures or heads duplicated in different positions, and with exacting visual description) gives way to singleness and isolated positions in the later paintings. It could be said that distant echoes of Michelangelo’s “Judgment Day” (particularly in the figurative compression and epic-historical telling of simultaneous stories) are transformed later into intimate lyricism. Indeed, a 1933 visit to the Vatican remained always in Salomon’s memory. Daberlohn, attempting to write his book, ponders the Sistine Chapel’s “Creation of Man” picture; the painting of the mother’s leap from the window shows her in the pose of Michelangelo’s Adam; and in another painting, where Salomon positions herself sitting in a boat with Daberlohn, she too is in the Adam pose of the same fresco. According to Van Alphen, Charlotte is Eve assuming the masculine creation-power of God-Adam-Jesus-Daberlohn. “I too believe in salvation through Woman,” Daberlohn expresses himself in one painting. It is no coincidence that over the past decades Charlotte Salomon’s work figures prominently in many studies of women’s art (with the emphasis on the feminine link between Charlotte and the grandmother), including those dealing with art and mourning (or suicide) and with art as emotional therapy.

Salomon’s work is not staid, it is full of invention. The pictorial-cinematic perspective (unlike the fixed perspective of a theatrical spectator) changes constantly. Sometimes the point of view is very high, sometimes straight on. Here we see a linear arrangement, there a centered focus or a diagonal construction, etc. There isn’t a picture to be found that is painted from the same angle as a previous one. More than once, the simultaneous use of various angles contributes to a primitivist flattening, while the figures are painted with no depth at all or are reduced and enlarged with no attention to realism. Interior and exterior can become intermingled: thus, for example, the picture of Franziska’s leap from the window is presented as viewed through the window. Thence, we see the window in miniature and/or the returning figure of the mother contemplating suicide.

Expressionism, in 1941-1942? Isn’t that a little late, in the twilight of the avant-garde (which left German expressionism behind, what with magical realism, new objectivism, dada, surrealism, and even the stirrings of the abstract in Paris)? Truthfully, from the standpoint of stylistic innovation, it’s doubtful that Charlotte Salomon broke new ground in modern art. However, Salomon was not dealing in the innovative or the contemporary. She devoted herself to expression as a means of individual survival and “resistance” (expressionism as anti-Nazism). Her expressionism could be seen as the work of a bold partisan, to be measured in terms of complexity, imagination, resourcefulness, depth, sensitivity, and humanity; and by those measures she has few equals.

It is difficult not to think “what if”: What if Salomon had come to Israel in 1939 with Erich and Louise Mendelssohn? I can see her in Jerusalem, the artistic center of the German immigrants, working as a teacher of painting and illustration at the “New Bezalel” school where Mendelssohn was a friend of the management. Would she have become a famed Israeli artist, or would she be exhausted, like most of the German-Jerusalemite artists, by the hopeless battle against the Parisian modernism of Tel Aviv? But what of Villefranche 1940, when a convergence of circumstances brought forth from Salomon wonderful and terrible forces which, for all we know, might not have emerged in another time or place? Could Life? or Theater? be an irreproducible miracle, such as befalls a one-book author? We cannot know. As of now, the triumphal achievement of Life? or Theater? is still making strong waves, competing for attention with Charlotte Salomon’s own story, which has been told again and again since 1972 (the pivotal year when the film and the first books about her life and work appeared). Will the story overwhelm the art, and devour it?

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This selection of images is but a fraction of Charlotte Salomon's more than 700 drawings painted for her unique Life? or Theater? - A theatrical vision in picture, word and music.

This is the translation from Hebrew into English by Mark Levinson of the original introduction, written especially by Gideon Ofrat for the Hebrew edition of the book To Paint her Life Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era by Mary Felstiner published in Israel to great acclaim by Maba in 2003 (with historical documents and 40 high quality full color reproductions).

Contact : Maba publishing Ronny Amir e-mail mabapubl@netvision.net.il

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