SALZBURG.- The cycle of paintings Life? or Theatre? by Charlotte Salomon (b. Berlin, 1917; d. Auschwitz, 1943) constitutes a singular document of German-Jewish life in 1920s and 1930s Berlin. The artist created the altogether 1,325 gouaches in France, where she lived in exile, between 1940 and 1942; soon after completing it, she was deported and murdered at the age of twenty-six. “The Museum der Moderne Salzburg exhibits a representative selection of 278 pages from this work, which stands out not only for its extraordinary history, but also for the spellbinding modernity of the compositions and the luminous colors of the gouaches,” Sabine Breitwieser, director of the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, who proposed the exhibition, explains. In the Rupertinum, right across from the Great Festival Hall, Life? or Theatre? is being presented together with mementos from Marc-André Dalbavie’s operatic adaptation of the cycle, which was commissioned by the Salzburger Festspiele and premièred to great acclaim in July 2014; one room in the show is dedicated to photographs and costumes from the production. As the curator, Beatrice von Bormann notes, “Salomon called her cycle a ‘Singespiel,’ and the work indeed interweaves imagery, writing, and music in unique fashion. The exhibition design accommodates this exceptional feature by giving the visitors an opportunity to listen to the music Salomon mentions—the references range from Johann Sebastian Bach to the Comedian Harmonists—as they study the respective gouaches.” The display also includes the texts accompanying the pictures, which Salomon sometimes wrote on transparent paper to overlie the associated gouaches, enabling the viewer to experience the magnificent cycle as a Gesamtkunstwerk.

The magnum opus of a life cut short, Life? or Theatre? is based on the history of Charlotte Salomon’s family and her experiences as a Jewish girl in Berlin. It is divided into three sections: a preface about her teenage years in Berlin, a central section that tells the story of her love for the singing teacher Alfred Wolfsohn, and an epilogue sketching her life in the south of France between 1939 and 1942. The earlier scenes are executed in fairly great detail, but over time Salomon’s style grows increasingly edgy, as though she knew that she had not much time left. The compositions sometimes suggest a storyboard for a film, with several scenes integrated into a single picture, views from elevated vantages, and sudden close-ups.

Charlotte Salomon was raised in a liberal Jewish family in Berlin; despite the Nuremberg Laws enacted under Adolf Hitler, she was able to study at the Vereinigte Staatsschulen für Freie und Angewandte Kunst in Berlin between 1935 and 1938. She dropped out when the school denied her the first prize in the painting class because of her Jewish ancestry. In 1939, she fled Germany, joining her grandparents, who had left in 1933, in the south of France. Her grandmother took her own life after the outbreak of World War II. Only then did Charlotte learn that her mother had not died of influenza, as she had been told, but committed suicide as well. Her grandfather died in February 1943. Charlotte Salomon entrusted the completed Life? or Theater? to Dr. Moridis, a physician in Nice, imploring him: “c’est toute ma vie” (“it is my whole life”). In June 1943, she married the Austrian emigrant Alexander Nagler. A few months later, Charlotte, who was now pregnant, and her husband were deported to Auschwitz and murdered upon arrival. After the war, the cycle came into the possession of her father and stepmother, who had survived the war in the Netherlands; they donated it to the Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam, where it remains today.

The exhibition Charlotte Salomon. Life? or Theatre? was organized in cooperation with the Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam