Charlotte Salomon

Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943) was a painter from Berlin who fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and spent the last years of her life at her grandparents' home in the south of France. Her grandmother's suicide led Charlotte to paint a dramatized autobiography in an extensive series of gouaches. In this autobiography, all the people that were important to her are brought to life in a special way: her father, her stepmother Paula Lindberg, the singing teacher Alfred Wolfsohn, her fellow students and teachers at the Arts Academy, her grandparents. The original paintings are in the possession of the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam.

This is the cathartic masterpiece of Charlotte Salomon. Entrusted to a friend before her deportation to Auschwitz, her gouache series Life? or Theater? live on as an artistic feat beyond category or comparison. Published here with the 450 most important pieces, including film-like sequences and musical suggestions, this fictional autobiography...

Charlotte Salomon is a Holocaust witness. She artistically recreates everything she experienced - her family's epidemic of suicides, her personal terrors, the cruelties of the Nazis, and the deceptions and self-deceptions of both Nazis and victims.

Featuring contributions from prominent art historians, literary and cultural critics, and historians, Reading Charlotte Salomon celebrates the genius and courage of a remarkable figure in twentieth-century art.

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Young Adult Literature A gripping middle grade biography of Charlotte Salomon, and an ode to how art can capture both life’s everyday beauty and its monumental horrors. "It’s my whole life" are the words Charlotte Salomon is said to have used to describe a series of thirteen hundred paintings she created between 1940 and 1942 while in hiding from the Nazis. The paintings are an extraordinary, vivid document: saturated in the sunlit colors of the Mediterranean; full of powerfully expressed love, anxiety, joy, and despair; and arranged as a sequential narrative overlayed with painted words, like a graphic novel. The story they tell is one of a prosperous childhood in prewar Berlin, of fleeing from the Nazi regime after Kristallnacht, and of going into hiding in southern France. There, as the war closed in, Charlotte Salomon painted feverishly, documenting her life and the often troubled lives of her family, her escape to and existence in France, and her struggle to come to terms with the darkness falling around her. When Germany took control of the region, she packed up the paintings and gave them to a friend for safekeeping. Shortly afterward, she was betrayed and deported to Auschwitz, where she was murdered. Charlotte Salomon’s painted memoir has been compared to Anne Frank’s universally famous work as a visual analog to Anne’s diary. It tells a compelling story—not only of the war and the Holocaust, but of a passionate, creative young woman hungering for a place in the world and the ability to express herself. In It’s My Whole Life, Susan Wider charts Charlotte’s life and illuminates her work in a distinctive first biography for young readers.

This is a poignant and graphic telling of the life of a young German Jewish woman taken and killed during the holocaust. Charlotte Salomon (Berlin, 16/04/17 - Auschwitz, 10/10/43) was an artist from a prosperous family whose mother committed suicide when she was just nine-years-old. One of several suicides within her family. She attended the School for Pure and Applied Arts until 1938 when the increasing antisemitic policies caused her to escape to the south of France to live with her grandparents. It was not the best of times. In 1941, now living alone she began painting what became over 1000 gouaches which she edited and added captions and overlays to create her life's work 'Leben? Oder Theater?' consisting of 769 of the paintings depicting a somewhat fantastical autobiography preserving the main elements of her life. She also made notes on appropriate music to accompany the art. In 1943 she handed the work over to the local doctor in a large suitcase with the wish that he "Keep this safe, it is my whole life." She had addressed it to wealthy American, Ottillie Moore in whose property she had stayed. By September that year she had married another German Jewish refugee, Alexander Nagler, and the two of them were arrested and she was transported to Auschwitz to the gas chambers when five months pregnant.

In the face of strong moral and aesthetic pressure to deal with the Holocaust in strictly historical and documentary modes, this book discusses why and how reenactment of the Holocaust in art and imaginative literature can be successful in simultaneously presenting, analyzing, and working through this apocalyptic moment in human history. In pursuing his argument, the author explores such diverse materials and themes as: the testimonies of Holocaust survivors; the works of such artists and writers as Charlotte Salomon, Christian Boltanski, and Armando; and the question of what it means to live in a house built by a jew who was later transported to the death camps. He shows that reenactment, as an artistic project, also functions as a critical strategy, one that, unlike historical methods requiring a mediator, speaks directly to us and lures us into the Holocaust. We are then placed in the position of experiencing and being the subjects of that history. We are there, and history is present--but not quite. A confrontation with Nazism or with the Holocaust by means of a re-enactment takes place within the representational realm of art. Our access to this past is no longer mediated by the account of a witness, by a narrator, by the eye of a photographer. We do not respond to a re-presentation of the historical event, but to a presentation or performance of it, and our response is direct or firsthand in a different way. That different way of "keeping in touch” is the subject of inquiry that propels this study.

This book investigates creative responses to the Nazi period in the work of three artists, Felix Nussbaum, Charlotte Salomon and Arnold Daghani, focusing on their use of pictorial narrative. It analyses their contrasting aesthetic strategies and their innovative forms of artistic production. In contrast with the autonomous, modernist art object, their works were explicitly linked with the historical conditions under which they were produced – the pressures of persecution and exile. Conditions in the slave labour camps and ghettos in the Ukraine, which shaped the paintings and drawings of Daghani, are contrasted with the experiences of exile in Belgium and France, which inspired Nussbaum and Salomon. In defiance of conventional artistic practice, they produced word-image combinations that can be read as narrative sequences, incorporating specific references to political events. While there has been a wealth of literary, philosophical and historical studies relating to the Holocaust, aesthetic debate has developed less extensively. This is the first comparative study of three artists who are only belatedly achieving recognition and the recent reception of their work is evaluated. By identifying the aesthetic principles and narrative strategies underlying their work, the book reassesses their achievement in creating new forms of modernism with an unmistakable political momentum. This book was published as a special issue of Word & Image.