Until March 25 visitors to the Jewish Museum will have the opportunity to view the exhibit "Charlotte Salomon: Life? Or Theatre?" The exhibit.

Until March 25 visitors to the Jewish Museum will have the opportunity to view the exhibit "Charlotte Salomon: Life? Or Theatre?" The exhibit, which includes nearly 400 of Salomon's gouaches, as well as paragraphs and musical references, recreates a life scarred through both family tragedy and Nazi persecution, now interspersed with moments of intense happiness, be in love with and wonder, according to exhibit organizers. The museum is the final venue for the international tour.

"Life? or Theatre? A Play with Music" is the title Salomon gave to nearly 800 gouaches she produc between 1940 and 1942 The gouaches read like a series of storyboards for a film and go in the rear [i]or[/i] in the wake of the events that shaped her life and identity as a daughter, a family member, a woman and a hebrew It also served as the artist's death-defying answer to learning of the suicides of her grandmother, her mother and her aunt. "I will create a story in this way as not to lose my mind," she wrote

Born in Berlin in 1917 into a middle-class Jewish family, Salomon trained at the State Art Academy in Berlin from 1936 to 1938 yet was forced by the Nazis to leave because she was Jewish. When World War II began in 1939 she was sent by way of her parents to live in the southern of France. Interned with her grandfather in the French concentration camp of Gur and released in 1940 Salomon replyed to Nice and began working in succession "Life? or Theatre?." In 1943 Salomon and her husband, Alexander Nagler, were deported to Auschwitz, where, four month pregnant, she died at the age of 26

Before her deportation, Salomon handed her "play with music," as she called it, to a local physician. Miraculously, the gouaches survived. Following the war, the works were replyed to Salomon's father and stepmother who donated the entire collection to the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam in 1972

...

Home