CHARLOTTE SALOMON LIFE? OR THEATRE?

An essay observing paintress work of art & theatre play based on it by Aleksandar Stefanovic

The conversation was of no interest to her. The only thing that absorbed her for the moment was the southern landscape. All this light and colour was new to her and struck a profound chord in her mystical, sensitive nature. She was delighted to be living at the Hermitage. All day long she sat in the garden, drawing and painting. Or she would lie for hours under an orange tree, looking into the blue sky. Sometimes she fell asleep, and woke drunk with happiness. She took little part in the life of the household. She lived in her world of light, air and colour; she did drawings with pencil ans charcoal, India ink, or crayon, and now and then delicate, fragrant ater colour: scenes in the garden, on the beach, on the street. Whenever she happened to be, she pulled out her sketchbook. She had to unburden herself, and her language was pencil or brush... Emil Straus, a friend

CHARLOTTE SALOMON, LIFE? OR THEATRE? * Preface *

- LEBEN? oder THEATER? or About Jewish Destiny - Composition of Act, Fine Art & Music in Theatrical Expression - Vision of the Director of Singspiel Gordana Lebovic - Vanja Ejdus Kostic as Charlotte Salomon - Costume Design, Music Design & Stage Set - Other 'Charlotte' International Theatrical Experience - After Charlotte / Epilogue - Photo Documentary - Credits

'Take good care of them . They are my whole life.'

LEBEN? oder THEATER? or About Jewish Destiny

The name Charlotte Salomon occurs in few, if any, general histories of XX century art & culture - not even those devoted to Germany - despite the fact that her work has been known since early 1960s. Its very singularity has stood in the way of its resognition. In establishing an artistic reputation, the context provided by an oeuvre accumulated over a period of time is all-important, yet apart from the guaches that make up 'Life? or Theatre?' , very few works by Salomon are known merely self-portrait and some juvenilia, most of which have been lost. Those rare art historians, curators and critics who have even heard of her have an image of Salomon as touchingly naive painter. This does her scant justice, for she was a completely mature artist when she set herself the task of creating 'Life? or Theatre?' . Its continuous narrative involves a seemingly endless stream of pictorial inventions that show a style developing as the work progresses: it is as if Salomon were aware she had to pack a lifetime's work int short space of time. On April 16, 1917, Salomon was born in Berlin to a family distinguished in the medical profession. But the family kept secret the fact that five of its members, including Salomon's mother, had taken their lives before her birth or in her childhood. Her father, Albert Salomon, professor at Berlin University's Medical School, married again in 1930. Through her stepmother, Paula Lindberg, a well-known mezzosoprano & socialite, Salomon first experienced the demands of love, the commitment to art, the crisis for Jews. Through Alfred Wolfsohn, an impoverished and charismatic voice coach employed by her stepmother, Salomon discovered passion, artistic conviction, and faith in self-disclosure. These influences from her stepmother and her mentor inspired her later work. Charotte was a 16 year old, impressed by Michelangelos 'Judgment Day' and 'Creation of Man' at the Vatican, at the time she had begun her art studies with private lessons in drawing, and within two years she had been accepted to the Combined Academy of Fine and Applied 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. Above all, Salomon won a distinction award from the Academy. Also, Charlotte was 23 in 1940 when she made an iconic painting of her face - a nameless, stateless, Jewish face. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Paula Salomon-Lindberg began working with the Jewish Cultural Association, the sole sponsor permitted for Jewish performers. Salomon was admitted to the famous Berlin Fine Arts Academy in 1935, a rarity for a Jewish student. Developing her considerable talent, she

found affinities with artistic movements the Nazis were working to suppress - Expressionism, poster art, caricature, and avant-garde theater. Life? or Theater? also registers the impact of Nazi power on one family: her grandparents decide to leave Germany; her stepmother is banned from the public stage; her father is fired from the university and thrown into a concentration camp; she herself is forced to leave the academy in 1938, then in 1939 to leave her family and Germany.

'Dear God, just let me not go mad'

With the pogrom of November 9 and 10, 1938 ('Kristallnacht'), everything changed for the Salomon family. Albert Salomon was tortured in the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen and after his release Lotte was sent for safety to her maternal grandparents in southern France. Arriving in Villefranche in January 1939, she found her grandmother deeply depressed, tried to rescue her, but failed. In spring 1940, she witnessed her grandmothers suicide, learned from her grandfather of seven other family suicides, including her own mothers, and saw herself as designated heir to this terrible legacy. 'Dear God', Charlotte cries out in the paintings, 'just let me not go mad'. To her parents, now refugees in Amsterdam, she wrote: 'I will create a story so as not to lose my mind'.

Charlotte with her grandparents Knarre

Salomon joined her grandparents in Villefranche, near Nice in southern France, where they were suffering the stresses of exile. There in 1940 at age 23 she witnessed her grandmother's suicide and suddenly learned the whole truth about her relatives. Uncovering the legacy of suicide from her family and culture brought her to "the question," as she put it: 'whether to take her own life or undertake something crazy and unheard of' - an autobiography in art. Probably this work would not have come into being in 1941 and 1942 if Salomon had not faced the possibility of suicide in herself, had not known the danger of a Nazi-dominated Europe, and had not settled in one of its safer corners. Apart form Charlotte, thousands of Jewish refugees found sanctuary on the French Riviera, especially after the Italian occupation in late 1942, for the Italian authorities rejected Nazi demands to deport Jews to the deathcamp of Auschwitz in Poland. When Salomon finished the 1,300 paintings and hundreds of texts for Life or Theater? she gave them to a friend in Villefranche for safekeeping. Charlotte then met Alexander Nagler, an Austrian-Jewish expatriate in his forties. She became pregnant and they decided to marry. For an unknown reason, Nagler insisted that they register with the local population bureau. This registration would determine the couples fate in the spring of 1943. Under the command of SS Captain Alois Brunner, the Gestapo conducted one of the most brutal roundups in Western Europe, ie. organized the deportation of 1,800 Jews from Nice. Charlotte was taken with her husband and sent to the Drancy

camp, and from there to Auschwitz. Upon their arrival in Auschwitz, October 1943, Charlotte, who was then 26 years old and five months pregnant, was sent immediately to the gas chamber. Her husband, Alexander Nagler, was sent to forced labor. He survived until early 1944. 'Life? or Theatre?' was Salomon's final work and her opvs magnum. Its nearly eight hundred gouache paintings relate the story of her short life, a life fated, as she was only too aware, to be framed by the two most momentous catastrophes of XX century European history. 'Life? or Theatre?' , its very title posing the ultimate existentiual question, records with astonishing imaginative power, acuity and poignancy the background to that history. It is narrated from the intensely individual vantage point of a highly 'privileged' person and affords both documentary and aesthetic insights of the greatest interest. For Salomon's work possesses simultaneously domestic and epic scale, a quality that permits it to stand as one of the few adequate memorials to the tragedy that culminated in the European, and particularly the Jewish, Holocaust. Charlotte used her life story to create a unique work of art. To understand the artistic translation of her life, one needs to know that certain elements play an important part in this process. These elements together create an atmosphere in which reality and fantasy become inseparable yet retain their own qualities. These elements are actually the means she uses - colours, actors, texts, music and film - and they are to serve one goal: to create for the audience a certain distance between herself as the subject of her own life story and herself as the story-telling artist, while providing as much emotional information as the audience needs to feel one with the artist and close to her party. Therefore, one might describe 'Life? or Theatre?' as a paradox in which the internal contradictions strengthen the total work.

Composition of Act, Fine Art & Music in Theatrical Expression

As autobiography, there is nothing like Salomon's work: Life or Theater?: An Operetta. It unfolds in 1,350 paintings of astonishing vividness and force, with acts and scenes, captions and narrative texts, dialogues, commentaries, and musical accompaniments. The characters, based on her own family and friends, have fictional names, and the whole work takes the form of a painted play. Charlotte Salomon describes her cycle as a 'Tricolor Singespiel'. The Singespiel consists of colours, pictures, music, texts and film, all brought by actors and their individual expression. Colours are important all through her work. She uses and mixes three colours to make a general remark on her play. Also, she wants to emphasise to the audience that her play with music is divided into three parts: 1) the names of the actors of the Prelude she paints in blue 2) those in the Main Section in red 3) and those in the Epilogue in yellow Speaking of the actors of her play acting her relatives, family and lover, she gives them nicknames:

Charlotte Kann alias Charlotte Salomon herself

Albert Kann alias Albert Salomon

Paulinka Bimbam alias Paula Salomon-Lindberg (Levy)

Grandparents Knarre alias grandparents Grnwald

Also, Charlotte Salomon tells us her story in three parts, to which she assigns the colors Blue /Prelude/, Red /Main section/ and Yellow /Afterword/. Charlotte 's role switches from that of child and student in

the 'Prelude' over that of creator and director in the Main Section to the victim in the 'Afterword'. In the painted story of her family and life she calls herself 'Charlotte Kann'. Everyone in her real life also receives a new name in her Singespiel. Blue Prelude (Vorspiel) The blue part of the cycle takes place in Berlin. It centers on the story of the family and Charlotte's childhood and teenage years. Charlotte Salmon painted the pictures about her childhood with many details. To the pictures she added long texts, written on tracing paper to be laid over the given picture. The story begins before Charlotte Kann's birth with the suicide of her aunt, Charlotte Knarre (Charlotte Grunwald) in 1913. Charlotte is later named for this aunt. A few years later, the surgeon Albert Kann (Albert Salomon) and the nurse Franziska Kann, ne Knarre (Franziska Salomon, ne Grunwald) are married. In 1917 Charlotte is born and grows up in an upper class household. As Franziska Kann soon loses her pleasure in life, she tells her daughter that she would rather be "an angel" and live in Heaven. When Charlotte is eight years old, her mother takes her own life. But Charlotte is told that her mother died of influenza. In 1930, Albert, who is by this time a professor at the university, marries the celebrated singer Paulinka Bimbam (Paula Lindberg), a woman of great charisma. Charlotte, too, adores her stepmother. Red Main Section (Haupteil) In the red part the characters Charlotte Kann, the singer Paulinka Bimbam and the voice teacher Amadeus Daberlohn play the main roles. A conflict-ridden complex of relationships develops between them. In the first half the voice teacher Daberlohn adores the singer Paulinka. Charlotte falls in love with the voice teacher and Daberlohn increasingly turns his attentions to Charlotte. Instead of writing her texts for this part on tracing paper, Charlotte painted them into the pictures. The text becomes a characteristic element of the picture. When a character speaks, that character's face appears on a series of sheets. For loquacious Daberlohn's monologues she resorts to a special design element: his flow of words spans several pictures. In longer sequences it is distributed over many sheets. The beginning of the 'Main Section' opens with the entrance of Amadeus Daberlohn, 'prophet of song' (JHM 4371). Daberlohn is based on Alfred Wolfsohn, Paula Salomon-Lindberg's singing teacher and possibly Charlotte Salomon's first lover. In the story, Daberlohn plays a central role in inspiring Charlotte's self-discovery as an artist. Armed with a letter of introduction, Daberlohn makes his way to the Salomon apartment, 'And that's how the new man enters the Bimbam-Kann home . . . And now our play begins!' JHM 4377 The voice teacher Amadeus Daberlohn (Alfred Wolfsohn) appears. He is supposed to work as rptiteur, as piano accompanist, for Paulinka Bimbam's rehearsals. He is enthralled by Paulinka and wants to apply his theories of vocal training to mold her into the best singer in the world. Paulina doesn't think much of his ideas, though. Daberlohn does make a great impression on Charlotte, however. His devotion and

encouragement inspire her artistic ambition and her heart. Initially Daberlohn sees in Charlotte merely a suitable object for his theories about the soul and artistic expression. Charlotte and Daberlohn become better acquainted. She falls in love with him. Now the secret love affair between Charlotte and Daberlohn begins. From Daberlohn/Wolfsohn, 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 Salomons art and even had her illustrate his writings. In Life? or Theater? Salomon describes Wolfsohns 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 internalised the covenant of the soul and of creativity, Salomon internalized Wolfsohns ideas of the centrality and essentiality of death both in life and in art. '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 Wolfsohns 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 Salomons 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 Wolfsohns 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. . Yellow Afterword (Nachwort) The setting of the Singespiel is now a town in sunny southern France. The emigrated Charlotte Kann is living there with her grandparents. Now she learns of the tragedy of her family history, known to the observer since the "Prelude". The more Charlotte confronts the tragedy of the suicides, the more expressive her drawings become. The pictures seem sketchy and impulsive. Charlotte is living in exile with her grandparents. When German troops invade France, the grandmother loses all hope and takes her own life shortly thereafter. Now her grandfather tells Charlotte about the suicides in her family, including her mother's suicide. After the German Wehrmacht invades France in May 1940 Charlotte and her grandfather are brought, with many other refugees, to the internment camp in Gurs. In July 1940 they are released because of the grandfather's advanced age. Charlotte Kann is close to a nervous breakdown. She sees herself presented with the choice of killing herself, or "etwas ganz verrcktBesonderes zu tun" ("doing something crazySpecial"), as she writes on

one of the last sheets, filled only with text. In this she remembers Daberlohn's words, that one has to "figure oneself out in order to reinvent oneself". She begins with the work on "Life? or Theatre?".

After Charlotte / Epilogue

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 Salomons 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 'arts Anna Frank'. When the Amsterdam Jewish Historical Museum took charge of her paintings from Salomons in 1971, 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 like forty blocks to the south. Although Charlotte Salomon died in Auschwitz, her father and stepmother, Albert and Paula Salomon, survived the war. In 1947, as soon it was possible to travel to France , they collected the work from Ottilie Moore, an American who had sheltered Charlotte in Villefranche. The Salomons stored the work until 1959, when they brought it to the attention of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. 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 daughters paintings would so excite museum director or that within two years Lotte's paintings from the museum exhibition would begin an international artistic acclaim; or that after a decade it would be recognized as one of the rare phenomena of modern times /CREDITS BY Charlotte Salomon's Life? or Theater? : A theatrical vision in picture, word and music by Gideon Ofrat & Marc Levinson/ After the Amsterdam show where it was exhibited for the first time in 1961, Charlottes paintings arrive in Israel 1962 for a modest exhibit at Beit Dizzengoff in Tel Aviv and at the Jewish Art Center in Ein Harod. Following the aftermath of Adolf Eichmanns capture, a German Nazi and SS-Obersturmbannfhrer who is referred to as 'the architect of the Holocaust', Salomons paintings took on a special international resonance, but they were also shadowed by the previously mentioned stereotype of 'Holocaust art'. 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.

Charlotte Salomon narrated what was becoming a progressively chaotic and destroyed life, trying to create a sense of wholeness in a world that was increasingly totalizing in its destruction of such a possibility. We are compelled to view her story retrospectively, in light of our knowledge of Salomon's fate in Auschwitz . Although Salomon provides a formal conclusion to her work, it does not offer a sense of closure. If the work of memory (or working through) involves developing a capacity to generate significance in different contexts, Salomon's multiply mediated work offers a methodology for such a project. Life? or Theater? does not proffer a privileged understanding of history, but instead creates a potential space for the viewer to tolerate the lack of resolution between different levels of reality and dimensions of experience. If Life? or Theater? offers an aesthetic of working through, the transparencies function as Salomon's archive of working through. These transparencies stage the relationship between the narrative text and the dramatic text, and provide the material traces of Salomon's imaginative negotiation between life and theater.

Photo Documentary