Reading Charlotte Salomon [Hardcover]

Michael P. Steinberg (Editor), Monica Bohm-Duchen (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 2006

Charlotte Salomon was born in Berlin in 1917 and was murdered at Auschwitz at the age of twenty-six. While in exile in the south of France from 1940 until her deportation in 1943, she created some 1,325 small gouaches using only the three primary colors plus white. From these she gathered nearly 800 into a work that she titled Life? or Theater? A Play with Music, which employs images, texts, and musical and cinematic references. The narrative, informed by Salomon’s experiences as a talented, cultured, and assimilated German Jew, depicts a life lived in the shadow of Nazi persecution and a family history of suicide, but also reveals moments of intense happiness and hope. The tone of the gouaches becomes increasingly raw and urgent as Salomon is further enmeshed in grim personal as well as political events. The result is a deeply moving meditation on life, art, and death on the eve of the Holocaust.

Salomon’s art, discovered after the war in the south of France where she had left it for safekeeping, was first exhibited in 1961 and has gained steadily in reputation since then. A major exhibition focused on Life? or Theater? appeared at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1998, subsequently at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Jewish Museum in New York City. This book, lavishly illustrated with many color plates, is the first to analyze Salomon’s work critically, historically, and aesthetically. It includes a chronology of Salomon’s life, a list of exhibitions of Life? or Theater?, and a filmography. 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.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Michael P. Steinberg is Professor of Modern European History at Cornell University. He is the author of Austria as Theater and Ideology: The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival; Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History (both from Cornell); and Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth-Century Music. Monica Bohm-Duchen is an independent writer, lecturer, and curator. Her many books include The Private Life of a Masterpiece and Chagall. Exhibitions she has curated include After Auschwitz: Responses to the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Rubies and Rebels: Jewish Female Identity in Contemporary British Art. She was co-curator of Life? Or Theatre? The Work of Charlotte Salomon (Royal Academy of Arts, London).

Product Details

• Hardcover: 233 pages
• Publisher: Cornell University Press; First Edition edition (February 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080143971X
• ISBN-13: 978-0801439711
• Product Dimensions: 10.1 x 6.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #115,571 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Too little known, September 30, 2009

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David Kaufmann "An interested party" (Washington DC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Reading Charlotte Salomon (Hardcover)

Charlotte Salomon, who was murdered by the SS in 1943, is perhaps the most moving of modern artists. She is also one of the least known, in large part because her work is so hard to present and even harder to place.

Her biggest and most important work, titled "Life? Or Theater?" consists of almost 800 gouaches on paper. Together they constitute a narrative, and nearly all are inscribed with text (some on transparent overlays; others directly on the painting). As if that were not enough, "Life? Or Theater?" is studded with cues to popular and classical tunes that are meant to serve as its musical score. But what, precisely, is it? While it is a unified work, it is also a stylistically diverse series of paintings. While it is usually exhibited on the walls of museums, it could just as reasonably be presented horizontally, like a book. It makes sense to treat it as a graphic novel, a story of ironic complexity and brutal honesty. But of course there is also the title, which indicates that this is really a piece of theater. Salomon did call "Life? Or Theater?" a Singspiel -- an operetta based on well-known music -- and provided it with the trappings of one, including a playbill.

It is hard to know how to describe her. A number of the members of her family killed themselves. She didn't, but was killed by the Nazis. The essays in "Reading Charlotte Salomon" -- the first academic collection dedicated to "Life? Or Theater?" -- are almost unanimous in their refusal to place the artist so squarely in the context of the Holocaust. One of the editors, Monica Bohm-Duchen, suggests that we should value Salomon's greatest work for "its complex and troubling insights into a life before Auschwitz." Dorothy Duerkle, a contributor, goes as far as to say that critical emphasis on the Shoah has blinded us to what "Life? Or Theater?" is really about. It is, she argues, really about trauma.

More than half the articles in "Reading Charlotte Salomon" interpret the artist in the knotty psychological terms of postmodern trauma theory. They thus present Salomon as a more contemporary, more international figure -- the artist as both a woman and a survivor. They pay closest attention not to the political trauma of National Socialism, but to domestic trauma, to the suicides that drive the narrative of "Life? Or Theater?"

In a far-reaching essay that will probably set the terms for future studies of "Life? Or Theater?" noted feminist art historian Griselda Pollock argues that Salomon's great work should not be taken as evidence. It is not an autobiography, but "a fantasia -- a screening of a life-saving movie." Its pages recount "not real but invented" memory. They make up a fiction that succeeds because it lends structure to the harsh, inchoate stuff of Salomon's family misery. It thus permits a form of psychic mastery over incapacitating loss. Pollock describes "Life? Or Theater?" as a "borderspace of shared trauma, which was both traumatizing yet solacing through the invention of memory through which trauma could be moved on from through the play of hybrid modernist representation."

While Pollock's arguments are wonderfully suggestive, this kind of prose remains icily forbidding. Moving through this collection, one often gets the sense that the desire to shatter old certainties inevitably leads to the consecration of new ones, each with its own jargon and pieties. Nevertheless, at its best, "Reading Charlotte Salomon" broadens and deepens our approach to her work.

It will take us a while to catch up to Charlotte Salomon. Yes, yes, she was assuredly both a victim and a survivor. But she was also, thank goodness, a good deal more. "Life? Or Theater?" is rich, harrowing and ultimately gorgeous. A talented painter, Salomon clearly understood most of the prevailing modes of modern art. Her stylish and often experimental compositions show that she had taken as her models Matisse, Modigliani, Chagall, Nolde and Munch, among others. As a result, she was equally skillful with brilliant color and oppressive monotone. She could express both the lightness of the French post-impressionists and the claustrophobia of the German expressionists. What is more, "Life? Or Theater" also reveals profound literary gifts. In its mixture of genres and its energetic mastery of forms, as well as in its sympathy, irony and manic flight from despair, "Life? Or Theater?" is a fitting culmination of German Modernism. It is also a work that stands -- improvisational, brave and vulnerable -- completely on its own.