Silvia Eiblmayr has seized the opportunity to present Charlotte Salomon’s life work in Austria too, in an exhibition originally devised by the Joods Historisch Museum Amsterdam – and hers is the only museum or gallery in the country where it will be shown. The ensemble of works making up »Life? Or Theatre?« includes more than 1,300 drawings by the artist, who was born into a German-Jewish family in 1917, grew up in Berlin and in 1939 fled to her grandparents in Villefranche-sur-Mer, where she was safe for a few years, before she was deported and murdered in 1943. From 1940 to 1942 Charlotte Salomon worked on this extensive image-text piece, and a representative selection of 300 drawings will be shown in the Galerie im Taxispalais. This work with its broad scope as a kind of »fictionalised biography« (Astrid Schmetterling) was Salomon’s legacy, which she entrusted to a neighbouring doctor for safekeeping with the words »That is my whole life!«.
Gouaches, devised as dense, compact works, often cramming entire episodes from start to finish onto one sheet, give an account of important events in Charlotte Salomon’s life in chronological order. Her own plans and dreams are embedded in her family situation and the political background, and follow the logic of a storyboard within individual sequences. Charlotte Salomon devised the works as a »Singespiel« (a type of lyrical drama intended to be set to music) thereby breathing a sense of musical composition and the performative into her oeuvre. She emphasises the synaesthetic effect of music and »text«, as she puts it in her writings, probably meaning both image AND text. Initially Salomon combined image and text by writing or drawing the text on transparent paper and placing this over the image. It was only later that she set the texts directly within the image. Explaining her approach, she described the text assuming shape in the course of a song. »Often«, as she put it, »several texts are formed«, entering into a polyphonic choir. The protagonists are identified with pseudonyms, although it is easy to recognise her father, a Berlin surgeon, her stepmother, a famous singer, her grandparents and various other figures important to Charlotte. The burden of tragic female suicides weighed on her mother’s side of the family and in the course of her brief life turned Charlotte Salomon into the only female »survivor«. In the face of these tragedies – her grandmother committed suicide in France and it is only then that Charlotte discovered that her mother had also killed herself – Salomon decided to record her life: »And she found herself confronting the question of taking her own life or doing something really crazy and special.«
Charlotte Salomon’s oeuvre is one of the most important testaments to Jewish life in the immediate context of National Socialism and the Holocaust, and is characterised by a dense textuality that subordinates the biographical subject-matter to its artistic ambitions. Salomon indicated the course she would steer, noting in the prologue that she had abstained from many artistic flourishes to allow her to proceed in a »soul-penetrating« way and give each of her protagonists a voice. When Charlotte began the cycle she was 23. She had already completed her art studies at the Berlin State School three years earlier, but must have continued with her artistic education and her work despite many protests, just as she repeatedly appears in these works, drawing and painting. Music was indubitably the predominant art form in the Salomon family, for Charlotte’s stepmother Paula Lindberg was an alto acclaimed by audiences and critics alike, and must have had a great influence on Charlotte Salomon. Amadeus Daberlohn (Alfred Wolfsohn) plays a very significant role in this context; he was Paula Lindberg’s singing coach and an important male mentor for Charlotte, who was also in love with him. He developed a special art theory for both Paula and Charlotte, and is a key figure in the entire oeuvre.
Her family setting probably meant that Charlotte Salomon was conversant with the link between art and music, which many of her contemporaries sought to establish during this period and this connection defines the basic thrust of »Life? Or Theatre?«. Music’s potential to shape and visualize time may have intrigued her just as much as its structural possibilities. The notion of the trinity of colours was important to her (»Three Colour Singespiel«). The work is also structured in three parts and ultimately image, text and music are the three fundamental elements giving it shape. The works on paper could also be interpreted as a score, though one could equally – like Gisela von Wysocki – imagine the work on a stage in a theatre today, or in a gallery as an art exhibition. Charlotte Salomon has therefore constructed a complex framework in her work.
Much has been written about the style of the depictions, the dense sequences, vibrant colours, the alternation between close-ups and clustered scenes divided into small sections. Commentators highlight both the cinematographic aspects and the affinities with expressionistic portrayals. Some scenes suggest familiarity with theosophic notions of auras and astral bodies. In contrast, others recall early silent films, their highly extravagant drama and montage of images and texts. Sometimes the drawings evoke apparitions and are reminiscent of dreams and vision, when individual scenes seem to be conjured up dramatically and enacted as if for the stage, once again underscoring the theatrical nature of Salomon’s concept.
It is extremely moving to observe how Charlotte Salomon presents herself as an artist. When she created this work, she was still of an age to be a student and was certainly still learning and struggling with doubts. In one drawing, identified as the start of the »epilogue«, we see her in multiple variations in front of a white canvas, on which she begins to sketch with blue paint. She repeatedly shifts position to adjust her gaze on her motif. This self-portrait in front of an almost empty canvas seems almost timid compared with the horror vacui of her finished works and reveals some inhibitions about taking herself as a (female) subject. Charlotte Salomon refers to herself in the third person and is the »author«. Her »text« envisaged vanishing from the surface »for a while« »to create her world anew from the abyss.«

 

Translated by Helen Ferguson

 

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