Life? Or theater?

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Title page of the sequence of images
Charlotte in bed with her mother Franziska. The picture alludes to the Christmas carol. The lights are on at the Christmas tree . On the right is the window in the Berlin apartment from which the mother jumped to her death in 1926
Text sheet
Self-portrait, Charlotte painting on the beach, her last picture

Life? Or theater? is the title of a cycle of works by the Berlin painter Charlotte Salomon , created between 1940 and 1942. It comprises 1,325 pictures in the painting technique gouache on paper, partly in comic or film style, with texts and music titles. It is the artist's main work and vividly describes and illustrates her life during a crisis in exile in southern France. Charlotte Salomon (born 1917) was denounced in 1943, then deported to Auschwitz and murdered.

description

The pictures are made using the gouache technique on paper and are 32.5 × 25 cm in size. Some sheets of the series are painted with text on tracing paper and, according to the artist's concept, should be placed on the matching pictures. The work is dedicated to Charlotte's American friend and supporter in French exile, Ottilie Moore . Ottilie Moore, with German roots, had married a wealthy American officer, owned the Villa L'Ermitage in Villefranche-sur-Mer and took in people persecuted by the Nazi regime. Since 1933, Charlotte's maternal grandparents lived in a small house on the property.

Charlotte Salomon's Leben crisis is both the persecution of Jews the Nazis also attributed as tragic incidents within their family. Both her mother (1926), an aunt (1913) and her grandmother (1940) committed suicide. In order not to go crazy herself (quotation from Charlotte Salomon), she began to describe her life in forced French exile in a concentrated, but also ironic-mocking form as a pictorial play or singing play (French: Opérette ).

The work - Charlotte also calls it Singespiel in three colors - is divided into three parts. In the prologue , which describes the period from 1913 ( her aunt's suicide ) to 1937, i.e. the time of her childhood and youth, the color blue dominates. The following main part, which describes her relationship to her great love, the singing teacher Alfred Wolfsohn, is predominantly painted in red. In the epilogue , which deals with the period from 1939 to 1942, her exile in southern France, yellow predominates. In addition, there are chapters, acts, acts and scenes in each part that illustrate the concept of a Singspiel. In short comic-like and cinematic-inspired and cut scenes, the sheets show their lives in the Berlin of the upper-class, assimilated liberal Jewish families , and then in French exile. Today it is considered a modern biographical work of art that uses a new, modern-looking visual language with close-up views, unusual perspectives, image sequences and cut motifs. The artist's intention was a theatrical staging of her life images. Between these images she assembles texts for explanation, but also music titles in order to awaken suitable musical associations when looking at them.

content

Charlotte Salomon first describes scenes from her youth up to 1937. Important people in her living environment appear, but all with different names. Charlotte begins the cycle of pictures with her childhood and adolescence and lets her aunt, who committed suicide in 1913, appear. In 1926, her mother also committed suicide. In 1930 her father married again; he married the singer Paula Lindberg - loved and admired by Charlotte. She was an intellectual, urbane woman, and much space is devoted to her in the work. She gives her stepmother Paula Lindberg the slightly ironic name Paulinka Bimbam .

Another important part of theater? or life? take people from the now musical environment of the family. Especially the musician and répétiteur Alfred Wolfsohn , mediated in 1937 by the Kulturbund Deutscher Juden , whom Charlotte admired because of its exotic-looking psychologically underpinned musical philosophy, but whom Paula Lindberg tended to smile at, played a major role in her work. Charlotte gave this important figure from her life story the name Amadeus Daberlohn in reference to WA Mozart, regarding the first name. The man was not wealthy, but as an unknown musician, dependent on the charity and wages of Paula Lindberg. Therefore Charlotte gave him the surname Daberlohn , after the word starve or starve . Quotes from this musician run through the entire series of pictures, who must have made a great impression on Charlotte and who believed in him. It was also he who recognized Charlotte's extraordinary artistic talent and encouraged her to follow this path. He was, so to speak, her support in the later life crisis. Charlotte tells his story as a romance . There are also other people whose vanities and attitudes she ironically comments on with musical puns. Finally, your grandparents form a disharmonious, dissonant element of this figurative-musical play. The grandmother committed suicide in 1940 in exile for fear of the advancing Germans . Charlotte named the unloved grandparents Dr. Knarre (Ottilie Moore often offered Charlotte the opportunity in her apartment to escape her grandparents, who absolutely disapproved of her painting, and later to escape her grandfather temporarily). Charlotte herself appears under the name Charlotte Kann ; she is defensive and defiant against the feared family curse of suicide after she is the next. So she can escape that.

Where the pictures are located, exhibition

Immediately before her arrest, in 1943 in Villefranche-sur-Mer , Salomon gave a tied bundle labeled Property of Mrs. Moore to her trusted doctor, Dr. Georges Moridis. It contained her artistic life's work with the sheets of the series Life? Or theater? and other work too. Moridis hid the remains in his house cellar on Avenue Maréchal-Joffre, where they survived the war. Ottilie Moore, Charlotte's supporter, to whom the work is dedicated, and who went into American exile with her daughter and nine children of persecuted people in September 1941, but returned to Villefranche after the end of the war, presented the pictures to Charlotte's father in 1947 , Albert Salomon and his wife Paula Lindberg, who escaped deportation in Amsterdam. They had come to Villefranche to look for traces of their daughter. In 1959 they passed the work on to Willem Sandberg, then director of the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum , who organized a first exhibition in 1961. A selection was then shown in Locarno , and then in the spring of 1962 in Israel . In 1965 the work could be seen in Berlin and in other German cities. In 1971, Charlotte's work went to the Joods Historisch Museum in Amsterdam , which has since kept the work on behalf of a foundation, conserved it and made it available for exhibitions.

Further exhibitions:

reception

  • In the late 1970s, Dutch filmmaker Frans Weisz began work on a film entitled Charlotte , based on a scenario by Judith Herzberg , which premiered in Venice in 1980 .
  • At the same time and in addition to the film, the volume Charlotte Salomon, Leben oder Theater? An autobiographical Singspiel in 769 pictures edited by the art historian Gary Schwartz.
  • Her story was retold by David Foenkinos in his 2014 novel Charlotte .
  • In 2014, the French composer Marc-André Dalbavie processed motifs from the work into an opera, which was performed under the title Charlotte Salomon at the Felsenreitschule in Salzburg . The libretto was written by Barbara Honigmann , directed by Luc Bondy and the stage set by Johannes Schütz.

For some time now, cultural studies has also been increasingly concerned with the work of Charlotte Salomon. The musicologist Thomas Schinköth, for example, refers to an alleged spelling mistake on the title page. There Charlotte portrayed the H in the word THEATER in a strange way. In his opinion, it could also be called TELEATER , an artificial word that should include a distant view. The painter steps out of herself in her work, keeps her distance and looks at her life from afar. She tells of herself as Charlotte Kann in the third person. Life? Or theater? is therefore much more than a simple autobiography, because the work blurs the dividing line between life story and work of art.

literature

  • Judith Herzberg, Charlotte Salomon: Life or Theater? An autobiographical Singspiel in 769 pictures. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1981, ISBN 3-462-01396-3 .
  • Charlotte Salomon, Christine Fischer-Defoy, Akademie der Künste: Life or Theater? The “life picture” of a Jewish painter from Berlin, 1917–1943. Images and traces, notes, conversations, documents. Das Arsenal, Berlin 1986, ISBN 3-921810-76-0 .
  • Judith CE Belinfante, Ad Petersen, Christine Fischer-Defoy, Charlotte Salomon: Charlotte Salomon: Life? or theater? Joods Historisch Museum / Waanders, Amsterdam / Zwolle 1992, ISBN 90-400-9719-4 .
  • Mary Lowenthal Felstiner : To Paint Her Life. Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era . Harper Collins, New York 1994, ISBN 0-06-017105-7 (Harper Perennial 1995; University of California Press 1997).
  • Edward van Voolen, Judith CE Belinfante, Charlotte Salomon: Charlotte Salomon - Life? Or theater? (Exhibitions: June 18 - August 22, 2004 in the Städelsche Kunstinstitut and in the Städtische Galerie Frankfurt; August 17 - November 25, 2007 in the Jewish Museum Berlin Foundation). Prestel, Munich / Berlin / London / New York 2007, ISBN 978-3-7913-3912-2 .
  • Frédéric Martin, Anne Hélène Hoog, Michel Roubinet et al .: Charlotte Salomon Vie? Ou théatre? Editions Le Tripode, Paris 2015, ISBN 978-2-37055-068-2 (French)
  • David Foenkinos: Charlotte. (translated from French by Christian Kolb) DVA, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-421-04708-3 (novel).

Web link

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Introductie op het werk. Website of the Joods Historisch Museum, Amsterdam.
  2. ↑ Charlotte Salomon “Life? oder Theater? ” (PDF) Museum journal of the Jewish Museum Berlin.
  3. ↑ Joel Cahen, Ad Petersen, Batya Wolff: Charlotte Salomon Vie? Ou théatre? Editions Le Tripode, Paris 2015, ISBN 978-2-37055-068-2 , p. 814 f.
  4. ^ Website yadvashem.org
  5. ↑ Charlotte Salomon. Life? or theater? Jewish Museum Berlin, 2007, accessed on March 16, 2016 .
  6. ↑ Charlotte Salomon. Life? or theater? Kunstmuseum Bochum, 2015, accessed on March 16, 2016 .
  7. ↑ David Foenkinos: "Charlotte" - Painting in order not to go crazy. Deutschlandradio Kultur, accessed on March 16, 2016 .
  8. ↑ David Foenkinos: Who is Charlotte? In: Zeit Online. Retrieved March 16, 2016 .
  9. ^ Website of the Salzburg Festival
  10. ↑ Review in the news magazine Focus
  11. ↑ Thomas Schinköth: Aid to survival through memory work: Life? or theater? A Singspiel by Charlotte Salomon. Script for a lecture at the University of Leipzig, 2006 thomas-schinkoeth.de (PDF, p. 2).