Charlotte: Life or Theater?
[Judaica]. Salomon, Charlotte. Vennewitz, Leila, translator. Charlotte: Life or Theater? An autobiographical play. Introduced by Judith Herzberg. New York: Studio Book from the Viking Press, (1981).
Large 4to.; 769 full-page color reproductions; grey cloth; cream dust-jacket with Salomon’s self-portrait on the cover.
First English translation of this heroic compendium of nearly 800 paintings with accompanying text, depicting the early struggles of Charlotte Salomon, “a young woman who was driven by persecution and war to give artistic form to the essentials of her life”; published almost simultaneously with the German edition.
Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943) was born and raised in Berlin, where she studied art at the Hochschule fur Bildende Kunst. She had almost achieved her degree when the Nazi threat forced her to flee to the south of France, where she joined her maternal grandparents on the estate of an American benefactress, Mrs. Moore. Shortly thereafter Salomon’s grandmother committed suicide, and she learned that this was the fate that had befallen several family members she previously believed had died of natural causes, including her own mother when Salomon was only nine years old. This reveleation, combined with the strain of her ambiguous relationships with both her step-mother and her lover (an inspirational artist nearly twice her age) and the impending doom of WWII, lead Charlotte to a critical moment when she herself contemplated suicide. She decided—partly at the urging of her former lover—to throw herself into her art. When she completed the book in the summer of 1942 she left it in the security of a friend, a local doctor, reportedly with this plea: “Will you take good care of this? ‘C’est toute ma vie.’” Her decision to entrust the work to a guardian was well-advised—Salomon was executed at Auschwitz the following year.
Salomon’s legacy surpasses these paintings—numbering nearly 800, most with her accompanying text—which tell the story of her life in a theatrical, if not necessarily performable, manner. Much of her work devolved to her father and step-mother (who had managed to escape the Nazi terror by going underground) and to Mrs. Moore. A portion of her work was published in 1963, and a 20-minute biographical film was released in 1972, the year the gift of Salomon’s archive was made to the Jewish Historical Museum. This translation into English of her texts written to complement—if not explain—the paintings, was lavishly published with the full-page, full color gouaches not ten years later, released in near simultaneity with the German edition.
A brief preface explains the material assembled here: the 769 gouaches are from two separate series, which staff of the Jewish Museum sorted out over the course of several weeks using an abandoned house as their giant filing cabinet. 211 of the gouaches had matching tracing paper bearing Salomon’s text; of the 558 remaining, nearly all incorporated text into the paintings themselves and are theatrically divided into Prelude, Main Section and Epilogue, and subdivided into Acts, Scenes and Chapters (they “do not follow an unbroken sequence”). Of the 193 sheets (gouaches and tracing paper texts) which remain, the Museum decided to include only those that “belong unmistakably to Life Or Theatre? and which contribute an unmissable element of continuity to the story. These have been inserted into their appropriate positions.” Among the unpublished works are texts which could not be “convincingly assigned” to their rightful paintings; variant or intentionally omitted scenes; and unrelated paintings. It is likely that the order the Museum chose is close to Salomon’s plan, but as evidence suggests she rearranged many pieces after numbering the sequence, we cannot be sure.
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