Art as a refugium of self-rescue and self-finding. Reading and understanding of Charlotte Salomon´s autobiographical work Life? or Theatre?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18778/0860-7435.35.07Keywords:
Charlotte Salomon, Germany, art, gouaches, reading, autobiography, “Life? or theater?”, modernism, HolocaustAbstract
The aim of this article is to show, in which way art can be used as an instrument, of self-conquest, self-finding and self-rescue as not to be forgotten by creating the appropriate distance, saving us from brutality and severity of reality and given times in which we live.
The example of the Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon of approximately 1325 painted sheets, from which 769 represent her biographic-historical masterpiece Life? or Theatre? A song play. It illustrates like a play in the form of a storyboard in word and picture her quite short life, her childhood and adolescence in the times of Weimar Republic, her antisemitic experiences at the Academy of Art, the machinery of the Nazi regime. She created her series of paintings over the duration of approximately eighteen months between 1940 and 1942. Salomon intertwined factual details from the memory of her childhood and adolescence and exile life. It is a reenactment, a conflation that raises compelling questions about the formation and operation of memory, showing both sides: the traumatic memory of the tragic family history and the present historical events of the Second World War, which she experienced and witnessed by herself. Charlotte Salomon created a multimedia work by combining colour, literature and music in an expressionistic way, using techniques from painters like van Gogh, Chagall, Munch and Nolde, to visualize in form of comics and musical settings, consisting of the chosen palette of music pieces from classical music to modern pop songs. Her complex drama is divided into three parts in a prologue; a main part and an epilogue like a theatre play.
Her work is nothing else as a synthetic depiction of life and unfulfilled love, suffering and death, created to survive. This intention of Charlotte Salomon confirms especially her own words, of the last gouache from the postscript on her back: Life? or Theatre?
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