Initially, Salomon kept all of the text on separate sheets, mostly of tracing paper the same size as the paintings, using both paint and pencil to write. Later however, only such things as chapter headings are separated, and the dialogue merges with the images on the same sheets. Salomon would convey more impassioned tones by intensifying the color of the painted words.
MUSIC
Salomon reportedly hummed constantly while she worked, and it is this internal soundtrack, a medley of classical music, folk songs and popular music for the movies, that became musical cues jotted down throughout the work to accompany certain scenes. In a comic gesture, the somewhat ridiculous, bespectacled Amadeus enters accompanied by the toreador’s song from Carmen while a simple little folk melody, ‘We twine for thee the maiden’s wreath,’ is used more ominously. The song is first noted at the festive occasion of her father and mother’s wedding, but echoes painfully and ironically when her grandmother looks out of the window at the crumpled figure of Charlotte’s mother below. The tune pursues the distraught Charlotte down the hall and into the bathroom where she shuts herself in to come to terms with her mother’s death.
Salomon explains the musical aspect of her ‘play with music’ on the first pages of Life? or Theatre?, writing, “The creation of the following paintings is to be imagined as follows: A person is sitting beside the sea. He is painting. A tune suddenly enters his mind. As he starts to hum it, he notices that the tune exactly matches what he is trying to commit to paper. A text forms in his head, and he starts to sing the tune, with his own words, over and over again, in a loud voice until the painting seems complete.”
STYLE
Salomon’s Gesamtkunstwerk, or ‘total art work’ has as much in common with the theater as it does with cinema. The work at times resembles a storyboard for a film. Often one page contains a whole story with multiple scenes fitted next to each other or layered vertically down the page. Salomon’s style is also full of long shots, close-ups, flash backs and montage.
What is also striking stylistically and compositionally is the difference between the beginning and end of the work. Early pages are rendered in rich detail and figures are painted with portrait-like clarity. In later pages, a minimum of detail is used and a hurried, expressionistic style takes over. Figures are stylized, much less representational and only suggest who the character may be. The very last pages contain only dense blocks of text. This stylistic shift could be attributed to Salomon’s growing desperation to finish the work in light of the increasingly dangerous situation she found herself in. However, Salomon suggests in her introduction to Life? or Theatre? that the changing quality of the work has to do with the characters themselves. She writes, “… The author has tried — as is apparent perhaps most clearly in the Main Section, to go completely out of herself and to allow the characters to sing or speak in their own voices. In order to achieve this, many artistic values had to be renounced, but I hope that, in view of the soul-penetrating nature of the work, this will be forgiven.”
And indeed it has. Well-known American author Jonathan Safran Foer, who participated in the curation of a 2010 show of Salomon’s work in Amsterdam, wrote the following in a special publication about the artist and her work, “Charlotte Salomon’s Life? or Theatre? didn’t strike me like lightening, but drenched me like a slowly building rainstorm. … no work of art has inspired me to strive to make art more than Life? or Theatre? has. No work is better at reminding me what is worth striving for.”
Images:
Charlotte Salomon, Gouache from "Life? or Theatre?," 1940-1942, Villefranche, France. Collection Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam. Copyright Charlotte Salomon Foundation.
Life? or Theatre? by Charlotte Salomon
More Articles
- Justice Department Releases Report on its Critical Incident Review of the Response to the Mass Shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas
- Jo Freeman Writes: The Lost Promise, American Universities in the 1960s by Ellen Schrecker
- Kristin Nord Writes: My Mother As a Young Widow Restarted Her Life Again in Midlife; I Began to Follow in Her Footsteps
- UC Berkeley Demographers: COVID-19 is Likely to Shorten the Average US Lifespan in 2020 By About a Year; "Those are real people, not abstract statistics"
- Searching Still Photographs for Army Personalities: At the Still Picture Branch at the National Archives, You Can Find Personality Indexes Aiding the Search for Specific Individuals in the Military
- Julia Sneden Wrote: Remembering ... On a Day Once Known as 'Decoration Day'
- From the GAO*: Religious-Based Hate Crimes; DOJ Needs to Improve Support to Colleges Given Increasing Reports on Campuses
- American Archives Month: FDR’s White House Map Room
- Kay Nielsen’s Enchanted Vision: The Kendra and Allan Daniel Collection
- Going Forth On the Fourth After Strict Blackout Conditions and Requisitioned Gunpowder Had Been the Law