In the early years of World War II, Charlotte Salomon, a 23-year-old Jewish artist from Berlin, fled to the south of France where she shut herself into a hotel room and spent two years feverishly painting the history of her life. She called it Life? or Theatre?: A Play With Music, an astounding body of over 1300 powerfully drawn and expressively colored gouache paintings conceived as a sort of autobiographical operetta on paper. On one numbered page after another, Salomon used an inventive mixture of images, dialogue, commentary and musical cues to tell a compelling coming-of-age story set amidst family suicides and increasing Nazi oppression. This singular creation would be Salomon’s only major work. Just one year after she completed Life? or Theatre?, the pregnant 26-year-old was transported to Auschwitz and killed.

The Contemporary Jewish Museum will be the only museum on the West Coast to show this new installation of Charlotte Salomon: Life? or Theatre?, an exhibition featuring nearly 300 of Salomon’s gouaches from the collection of the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam. The exhibition highlights the main acts of Salomon’s sweeping narrative, allowing visitors to appreciate not just the individual strength of each piece but also its serial nature.

“Life? or Theatre? is an extraordinary work of art that deserves and needs to be seen,” says Connie Wolf, director of the Contemporary Jewish Museum. “Anyone with an interest in the creative spirit will be moved and awed by Salomon’s compelling magnum opus. This lifetime of work, created in such a short space of time with no promise or even hope of recognition, speaks so deeply to how essential an act of art making can be. We are so thrilled to be able to bring this to a wider audience.”

THE STORY

Salomon structured Life? or Theatre? as a play with a prologue, a main part, and a finale. The prologue focuses on her childhood and adolescence in Weimar and Nazi Berlin; the main section on a man who would be Salomon’s greatest artistic inspiration and first love; and the epilogue on her life in exile.

The story was certainly her story, and she recollects it in detail, but as her own title suggests, Salomon fictionalized elements. Certain inventions are immediately apparent -- she gave stage names to the family and friends that became her cast of characters including her own stand in, Charlotte Kann — but the extent to which the narrative of Life? or Theatre? embellishes or strays from the truth remains, in some respects, unknown. The exhibit has now been extended til October 16th. 

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