Charlotte Salomon. Life? or Theatre?

When German artist Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943) handed her gouache series Life? or Theater? over to a friend, she beseeched him to "take good care of it, it is my entire life." A few months later, the five-months pregnant Charlotte was picked up by a Gestapo truck, deported to Drancy, and then on to Auschwitz, where she died upon arrival at the age 26.

The work Salomon left behind is, in a very real sense, her pi ce de r sistance - in her own words, "something wildly eccentric." A cycle of nearly 1,300 autobiographical gouaches, it combines creative force with pioneering personal narrative into one shattering document of self-expression.

Divided into three sections, the gouaches unveil a vivid self-portrait spanning across all facets of Charlotte's existence: from a complicated family life, marked by the suicides of nearly all female relatives; growing up in Berlin; her close relation to singing teacher Alfred Wolfsohn; the rise of the Nazis; to her exile to France in 1939. Throughout, the artist challenges these destructive forces by deploying playful pseudonyms and fantastical elements alongside emotional candor, remarkable observation, and a meticulous visual memory. Her film strip-like sequences are interspersed not only with words but also musical suggestions, making Life? or Theater? the storybook for a whole musical, years before the heyday of that genre.

Without comparison, the gouaches are a triumph of personal truth and individual expression. Published here with a selection of the 450 most important pieces, Life? Or Theatre? is an unrivaled opus magnum from a great and ambitious artist, dark with her early death, but luminous with her precision, her lyricism, and her courage.

Author: Judith C. E. Belinfante, Evelyn Benesch
Publisher: Taschen
Published: 11/20/2017
Pages: 600
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 3.60lbs
Size: 9.80h x 7.00w x 1.80d
ISBN: 9783836570770

About the Author
Belinfante, Judith C. E.: - Judith C. E. Belinfante studied Modern History at the University of Amsterdam. From 1976 to 1998, she was the Director of the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam. After a subsequent period as a parliamentary deputy, she was a leading curator of the special collections at the University of Amsterdam Library from 2003 to 2008. She chaired the Charlotte-Salomon Foundation from 2002 to 2017.Benesch, Evelyn: - "Evelyn Benesch is deputy director of the Bank Austria Kunstforum in Vienna. In her long career as an exhibition curator, she has focused on the many artists of classic modernism - from Paul Cézanne to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, from the Futurists to the painters of Die Brücke, and from Pierre Bonnard to Balthus."

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