This self-portrait by Charlotte Salomon from 1940 gives an idea of how much the events of that time affected her.
(Photo: Collection of the Jewish Museum Amsterdam © Charlotte Salomon Foundation)
Where is the beginning and where is the end of the story? Such a short life, such a grim destiny. In addition, such an imaginative, exuberant, lively and at the same time infinitely sad, incomparable work. Disregarded for a long time, misinterpreted at times, presented and interpreted by numerous artists in music, drama, dance and film. And understood today?
The story seems compelling. Charlotte Salomon: artist, painter, writer, music lover. Daughter from a middle-class family, born in Berlin-Charlottenburg in 1917, grew up in a liberal Jewish family. In 1939 she emigrated to southern France, where her grandparents fled early. In the summer of 1943 she married a Jewish exile from Austria. In September 1943, she and her husband were betrayed and arrested in Nice. On October 7, they were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where Charlotte Salomon was murdered, presumably when she arrived five months pregnant. Do your pictures show this CV?
You have to read this exhibition. Read much. Nothing helps. The lyrics play a huge role. They are poetry and drama, sensual and disturbing, truthful and genuine and fictional at the same time – just like the images that accompany them. Single images, hidden objects, small series, entire series. Arranged script-like, not dissimilar to a comic or graphic novel. One walks through the darkened art building of the Lenbachhaus in Munich, reading and looking, looking and marveling. If you also listen to the music that Salomon mentions and that is played through headphones at individual stations, you will encounter a multi-sensory art experience.
“Life? Or Theater? – A Singespiel” is the name of Charlotte Salomon’s artistic life’s work, which began even before she was born. A work on hundreds of sheets – originally more than 1300. In just 18 months between 1940 and 1942 she painted it in a fictionalized form on paper, then selected 769 of these gouaches, numbered them, provided them with explanatory texts and music notes and made them into the “Three Color Singespiel” – consisting of a prelude, a main part and an afterword – composed.
“It’s much nicer in heaven than it is on this earth,” the mother tells the child before she throws herself out of the window. Gouache from “Life? or Theater?” by Charlotte Solomon.
(Photo: Collection of the Jewish Museum Amsterdam © Charlotte Salomon Foundation)
Charlotte is now sitting in her bed to the tune “Yes, love has colorful wings”. Gouache from “Life? or Theater?” by Charlotte Solomon.
(Photo: Collection of the Jewish Museum Amsterdam © Charlotte Salomon Foundation)
The texts and musical notes were initially written and drawn separately on tracing paper. Then they became more and more part of the pictures themselves. With the words “This is my whole life” she handed over “Life? or theatre?” finally in 1942 a confidant. A suitcase full of pictures and texts, kept in the Jewish Museum Amsterdam since 1971. Partially shown, also at the Documenta 13 in Kassel 2012. Rarely – as here in Munich – so extensively exhibited.
The first sentence is already a statement and the pictures describe it adequately: “On a November day, Charlotte Knarre left her parents’ house and threw herself into the water.” And then, like screaming headlines the following day: “Suicide of an eighteen-year-old! Charlotte seeks death in Schlachtensee!” This Charlotte is not the author, as one might initially assume, it is her aunt. In the prelude, Salomon’s alter ego Charlotte (last name Kann) looks back on the family history and begins in the years leading up to her birth. This prologue takes place in the Kunstbau in front of cool, blue walls, following the colors of the “three-colour singe play” in blue, red and yellow.
The main part is highlighted in red. The life story picks up speed and colour. In addition to individual portraits full of clarity, Salomon focuses on motifs that condense and become pictorial stories full of details. There are rows of abstract structures in expressive reduction. From a distance, these look like fleeting line patterns, when you come closer they look like an arrangement of pistols, and from close up you can finally see the elongated, lying figures. Expression of a multiple personality?
Gouache from “Life? or Theater?” by Charlotte Salomon, based on the melody “How I love you – never before has a person loved like this.”
(Photo: Collection of the Jewish Museum Amsterdam © Charlotte Salomon Foundation)
Real and fictional characters merge. Salomon’s relationship with the singing teacher Alfred Wolfsohn plays an important role, as does the increasing threat from the National Socialists. The artist places social events next to personal experiences in painting and writing. She reinterprets some things, interprets the world from her point of view.
It was probably this mixture of cool distance and personal closeness in Charlotte Salomon’s complex work that inspired numerous artists from other fields. In 2014 there was an opera version by Marc-André Dalbavie at the Salzburg Festival, and the following year Bridget Breiner premiered Salomon’s life story with “Death and the Painter” at the Musiktheater im Revier. And in 2017, Pamela Howard dedicated her another opera in Toronto, Canada, with “Charlotte: A Tri-Coloured Play with Music”.
Filmmakers were also fascinated by it, from Georg Stefan Troller (“Pariser Journal: Die Malerin Charlotte Salomon”, 1963) to Frans Weisz, who approached her twice: in 1981 with a feature film and in 2012 with a documentary film. Most recently, “Charlotte,” starring Keira Knightley in the title role and directed by Eric Warin, hits screens as an animated film in 2021.
In the end, Charlotte Salomon painted herself: painting with the title of her life’s work on the back “Life? Or Theater?”.
(Photo: Collection of the Jewish Museum Amsterdam © Charlotte Salomon Foundation)
In the epilogue to the three-part work – the yellow of the walls is in total contrast to what one experiences here – Charlotte Salomon explains how “life? or theatre?” came. In the early 1940s, the grandmother, who was suffering from depression, committed suicide in exile in southern France. Her grandfather then tells her about the suicides of her mother and aunt. Painting and writing, she deals with the fear of becoming depressed herself and throwing herself out of the window or into the water. In a wild creative frenzy, she releases all the images from her head.
So much for the interpretation of the work up to 2010. Only then was a “letter” by Charlotte Salomon made public in large parts, which she had added to the afterword in February 1943 and which the family, who discovered it after the war, only then released . In it Charlotte Salomon’s confession that she poisoned her grandfather with an omelette laced with Veronal. The young woman who had rebelled against her fate with almost childlike fantasies, a coldly calculating murderess? The “Singespiel” an act of revenge? The attempt at a new interpretation continues to this day.
In any case, you see this exhibition in the Lenbachhaus, which was created in cooperation with the Jewish Museum Amsterdam, in a slightly different light when you think of it from the end.
Charlotte Solomon: Life? or theatre? Lenbachhaus Munich, until September 10th