The Contemporary Jewish Museum is the only West Coast museum to show this new installation of Charlotte Salomon: Life? or Theatre?, an exhibition featuring nearly 300 of Salomon¹s gouaches from the collection of the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam. The exhibition highlights the main acts of Salomon¹s sweeping narrative, allowing visitors to appreciate not just the individual strength of each piece but also its serial nature.
In the early years of World War II, between 1940 and 1942, Charlotte Salomon, a 23-year-old Jewish artist from Berlin, fled to the south of France where she shut herself into a hotel room and spent two years feverishly painting the history of her life. She called it Life? or Theatre?: A Play With Music, an astounding body of over 1300 powerfully drawn and expressively colored gouache paintings conceived as a sort of autobiographical operetta on paper.
The work is autobiographical but also fictional, dealing with contemporary events but in a symbolic and allegorical fashion. Life? or Theatre? is a comprehensive work of art, her Gesamtkunstwerk, a "total artwork," a genre popularized by the German romantic movements of the mid-19th century. Since she came from a cultured Berlin Jewish family and her adored stepmother was a singer, the connections were deliberate. Her bold and brightly colored expressionist gouaches also contain instructions that the viewer hum along to stipulated tunes.
She said the work was intended to cleanse the world.
The work is passionate, intelligent and demands concentration as well as multiple viewings. There are layers of symbolism with predominant motifs of suicide (her mother and grandmother both committed suicide), water which represents both death and life, music, love, anti-Semitism, WW I and WW II. That list barely scratches the surface. The very title of the work Life? or Theatre? poses a number of questions, whether life and theatre are polar opposites or engaged in a dialogue. Why, for instance does Charlotte place a question mark after both life and theater? She does not answer the question; that is left up to the viewer.
Artistic influences seem to have been Munch, Modigliani, Chagall, Marc, the Fauves and, in the United States, Florine Stettheimer. Her work can look raw but she was not an outsider artist. Highly cultured and trained in art, she makes sophisticated allusions to art, literature, music and philosophy.
"I myself needed a year to figure out what this singular work is about,'' she said, ''for many of its texts and melodies, especially in the first sheets, have slipped my mind.'' Image and text are sometimes not very well integrated; after all she was very young and under immense pressure. But the work is far from solemn and that makes viewing even more painful. She dared to do in private what she could not do in public, to laugh at Germanic pontificating, at the more ponderous and ridiculous aspects of the culture, the yearning for the absolute, the Wagnerian over-the-top bellowing, complete with horned helmet and a medley of creatures from a nightmare.
Her saga records the important events of her life, her mother's suicide, her father's remarriage to the singer Paulinka (in real life, Paulina Lindberg), whom she idolized and the appearance of a hapless, theory-obsessed singing teacher, Amadeus Daberlohn (Alfred Wolfshon in real life), who fells madly in love with Paulinka, only be be rejected. Daberlohn is, after Paulinka, the central figure in the narrative and hundreds of pages are devoted to him. In the narrative, he becomes Charlotte's lover (and possibly Salomon's lover in real life). The Nazi's rise to power is introduced by a frightening painting of troops, marching under the swastika banner (Salomon always inverted the swastika.) The increasing repression toward Jews is chronicled and the ever looming danger of death. The images are heightened by humor and beauty. They are sometimes philosophical, sometimes ironic and sometimes poetic. To be truthful, the work is sometimes repetitious, but visionary to the end.
Life? or Theatre? stops here where it begins. Acquaintances reported that Salomon was so possessed during its creation that she only rarely stopped to eat, drink and sleep.
Salomon survived for one year beyond the completion of Life? or Theatre? – a year that became increasingly dangerous after the Italians occupied Southern France and began to deport Jews to camps in Germany. Her grandfather passed away and Salomon, sheltering in a villa owned by an American woman, married the villa’s sole remaining resident, an Austrian refugee named Alexander Nagler. The marriage doomed the couple – it was Nagler’s attempt to get a marriage license at the local police station that gave them away as Jews. Salomon was pregnant when both she and her husband were picked up by the Gestapo. Salomon was killed immediately on arrival at Auschwitz; Nagler murdered a few months later.
The last image, the one in which she faces the sea, has this text: ''And with dream-awakened eyes she saw all the beauty around her, saw the sea, felt the sun, and knew she had to vanish for a while from the human plane and make every sacrifice in order to create her world anew out of the depths.'' Her journey and our journey with her has taken on so many meanings that is it transformed, over and over again, from a story of a family tragedy, caught up in a political tragedy to a genuine philosopical liebestod.
Before she was deported, Salomon gave ''Life? Or Theater?'' to Georges Moridis, a doctor and friend in the Resistance. ''Take good care of it,'' she told him. ''It is my whole life.''
It is said that art saves lives. It didn't save Salomon's life, but the art that was saved gave her immortality.
http://www.thecjm.org/index.php. Through July 31, 2011
The complete work is on line at the Jewish Historical Museum
http://www.jhm.nl/collection/themes/charlotte-salomon/leben-oder-theater
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