Culture Watch
In this issue:
ART
"Take Good Care Of It''
Charlotte Salomon: Life? Or Theater?
The Jewish Museum, New York City
In the south of France, Charlotte Saloman was working at a hectic pace. Raised in Berlin, the artist was in her early 20s when the growing Nazi menace led her parents in 1939 to send her to what seemed like a safe exile with her grandparents. Now it was 1940 and she was rushing to complete a remarkable series of 769 autobiographical paintings. But the Nazi noose was tightening all across Europe, and when she filed to be married in 1943, officials discovered her identity. She and her new husband were put on a transport to Auschwitz, and Saloman, four months pregnant, was killed almost as soon as she stepped off the train. Before the deportation, however, she had made a desperate attempt to save the paintings. She wrapped them in brown paper and placed the package in the hands of a trusted physician who was a member of the French Resistance with an urgent, haunting instruction: "Take good care of it; it is my whole life.''
The paintings survived the Holocaust, and 400 of them can be seen at New York City's Jewish Museum (www.jewishmuseum.org) from now through March 25 in an exhibit that is affecting since we know that this talented young woman's life ended so terribly, yet exhilarating too because of the verve and originality of her work. Using opaque watercolors, or gouache, Salomon blended the three primary colors and white to create a harmonious palette and printed her text directly onto the work as an integral part of the composition or wrote her narrative on tracing paper that she then fastened to the painting's edge as an overlay. She depicted 20 characters , all of them pivotal people in her life, like an experienced and sophisticated cinematographer, viewing them from shifting vantagepoints--close-ups, through flashbacks, distant or overhead angles. Multiple story lines may spill together as in a montage or in cartoon-like panels onto a single painting, but the focus remains on the central character, Charlotte herself.
While she was creating this fictionalized drama of herself in words and images, Salomon gave it the questioning title "Life? or Theater?.It is both. She had an uncanny ability to view her brief time on the world's stage as though she were simultaneously the star in the spotlight and a member of the audience watching herself. This dual perspective pulls the viewer into the story. The drama of her life fed her art. After several failed suicide attempts, her mother threw herself out a window when Saloman was not yet ten and she was told that influenza had claimed her mother's life. Her father, a respected physician, married a well-known opera singer, and Salomon began a complex, love-jealousy relationship with her stepmother. Enter a self-absorbed voice teacher, an older man, who begins an intense affair with Charlotte at the same time as he was in love with the stepmother. More than anything, Salomon wanted to become an artist, though her family seemed to believe she had little talent. Nevertheless, she studied in Berlin's State Art Academy from 1936 to'38, until she was forced to withdraw because she was Jewish. It is clear that Saloman was familiar with the contemporary currents in European painting; there are influences of Modigliani in the long faces and attenuated, curving full-length figures of her characters. Quick, stabbing brushwork is reminiscent of Van Gogh, and there are touches of expressionism and social commentary like those in George Groz's savage cartoonish portrayals of German society between the wars.
The three members of the Saloman family--doctor, singer, artist--dwelt in the comfortable, middle-class German-Jewish cultural world that was soon to disappear, and Charlotte 's paintings are a testament to that vanished time. But more than that, they tell the compelling, ageless story of a young woman's coming of age and awakening to her own physical and artistic desires. Late in the series, Charlotte, now grown, finally learns the truth about her mother's death and that five other members of her family had also committed suicide. Will this family obsession with self-destruction claim her too? "How beautiful life is,'' reads the text for Charlotte in one painting. "I believe in life. I will live for them all.'' And through her art, she did.
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