CHARLOTTE SALOMON
Life? or Theatre?


by Gerald Needham


Published in ARTFOCUS/69, August 2000, ©ARTFOCUS MAGAZINE



Charlotte Salomon/ The artist as an art student @ the State
Art Academy in Berlin, 1936-1938 / gouache on paper1940


The Art Gallery of Ontario is to be congratulated in securing the only showing in Canada of the travelling exhibition, Charlotte Salomon: 'Life? or Theatre?'. Without doubt it is much more interesting than the National Gallery's 'Yet Another Exhibition of Over Familiar Impressionist Paintings' which opened in Ottawa in June.

Salomon's art is not as well-known as it deserves to be, as the series is so huge and complex that it cannot be exhibited in its totality. This show, though, does give us a real entrance into Life? or Theatre?, the work that is practically all that we have left of Salomon's art today.

As many readers will know, Salomon was a young Jewish artist from Berlin taking refuge from Nazi Germany in the South of France. Between 1940 and 1942 she feverishly produced these approximately 800 sheets of gouaches with texts before she was arrested in 1943. She was then transported to Auschwitz where, at the age of 26, her life was snuffed out .

The gouaches tell the story of Salomon's upper crust, intellectual, German Jewish family, slightly fictionalized and as theatrically imagined by the artist, in a series of episodes which sometimes parallel each other or go back in time. Just before she was taken away, she wrapped them in brown paper and gave them to a French friend, with the injunction, "Take good care of them; they are my whole life."

The packages survived the war, as did Salomon's parents in hiding in the Netherlands. They received them in 1947 and later gave the work to the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam.

In the vast mass of pages that are put up for our viewing, only some are numbered and though mostcan be placed in the correct order, it is not always clear how they should be arranged or whether all the pages belong to the series. Salomon obviously drew some of the later sheets much more hurriedly than the more detailed earlier ones and she probably did not complete a final editing. The pages are all 32.5 x 25cm., and most contain texts: descriptions, comments, dialogues, and sometimes musical references. At first the texts were written on tracing paper overlays, but then were done directly on the pictures. As can be seen, the result is often like a comic strip, with repetitions of figures in a single frame as they converse with each other and a narrative which developes from one picture to the next.

The work obviously poses a number of questions to us: firstly, how do we see and absorb this enormous undertaking? There are far too many pictures to take in during a brief museum visit. The occasional travelling museum exhibition is still going to leave most people unaware of her work. Then we have the question of how to approach the pictures. Do we think of them as a series of works to be approached individually (as we look at a painting by Munch, for example The Scream, which was considered by the artist to be part of the Frieze of Life), or do we partially overlook the individual effect in order to grasp the sequence? And what about the texts, and the musical references? Sarah Milroy, in The National Post, has also asked if our knowledge of Salomon's fate may blur our critical faculties.

The best way to present Life? or Theatre? is obviously in facsimile reproduction in book form, without the overlays and with the texts printed above or below. This was done in 1981 by a German publisher. An English translation, which is now out of print, was also made at that time. Fortunately, a new version has been made for the touring exhibition, although the images are reproduced in a smaller format. The sheer number of illustrations means that the book must be expensive ( $70 dollars in Canada), so that popular access is still restricted. One can only hope that public libraries will obtain the book so that it can circulate more widely.

Given the difficulties, the exhibition organizers have done an excellent job of presentation. The 400 images selected are arranged in two rows with the texts in English below on a sloping shelf at a comfortable eye level. We can easily look at and read the captions, even if we cannot absorb all the images. The accessibility of the work brings home the absurdity of those contemporary artists who pin large sheets of writing to a wall. Most people do not read a book or newspaper holding it vertically. When we are faced by a large sheet on a wall, we can read only what is at our eye level: the rest seems to be an insult by the artist to the viewer.

Life? or Theatre? may present difficulties in the hurried state Salomon left it, but it was designed to be eminently reproducible. This point brings us to our next question. Do we consider the work a series of paintings or as a graphic work? The exhibition organizers seem anxious to separate it from popular graphic art. In the catalogue introduction the names of Giotto, van Gogh, Michelangeloand other painters are brought up, while another essay develops the idea of a relationship to film. There is anartistic snobbery here which I find quite misleading. Popular graphics played an enormous role in the art world in the 19th and the early 20th century--a fact often forgotten today. After such remarkable artists as Daumier, Gavarni, Steinlen and Toulouse-Lautrec and so many others in the 19th century, in the 20th century we have Lyonel Feininger, both a distinguished painter teaching in the Bauhaus and the creator of the famous comic strips, The Kinder Kids and Wee Willie Winkie; we have the artists of Simplicissimus, the German caricature magazine; also Heinrich Zille's wonderful caricatures of life in Berlin--too little known outside Germany; and Franz Masereel's picture novels. We can also add other German artists like Kathe Kollwitz and George Grosz.

All this was a vital part of the German art world of the first 40 years of the 20th century and to my eye, played a much more important part in Salomon's work than Michelangelo. It was the media of the comic strip and the caricature that enabled her to tell the stories of people's lives. The pictures reproduced here give some idea of the variety of Salomon's images. There are the more elaborate early images with overlays, and nothing written on them, the exuberant pictures of the young Charlotte working on a canvas, the almost strange repetition of heads with their conversation written around them, rather than in balloons...and we also have the later images, perhaps too rapidly executed for the figures to be really expressive.

The conception of Life? or Theatre? is too rich and too original for it to be worthwhile for the critic to make a definitive judgment. It is better for viewers to study it and reach their own conclusions.

A final twist is the musical element. Salomon sub-titled her work Ein Singespiel (untranslatable in English) and added many musical references. We are reminded of how musical the German Jews were. But how are we to incorporate this into viewing the work? An admirable feature of the AGO's exhibition is that the visitor is given an audiophone, mercifully free of interpretation. This device gives us a setting for each episode and vocalizes some of Salomon's captions, so that we don't have to be distracted by reading when trying to look at the images and we hear the music itself, not just a reference to it.

The result of this thoughtfully presented exhibition is that most people who have seen it, want to see more of Charlotte Salomon's work.

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Author

AICA member Gerald Needham is a professor @York University, Toronto.
He is the author of 19th Century Realist Art,Harper & Row, l988.