The soul-struggling survival work: Charlotte Salomon in Munich’s Lenbachhaus

“Life or Theater” is written on the back of the young woman, who is sitting by the sea in a bathing suit with a brush and drawing pad. It is the last picture in a huge collection that the Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon created in just under two years after fleeing Berlin to southern France in 1938. With her “singe play” of drawings, lines of text, scenic and musical notes, she left behind a unique work of art. More than half of the 769 sheets can currently be seen in Munich’s Lenbachhaus.

Murdered in Auschwitz

On a blue, red and yellow background, the sheets are lined up chronologically as a prelude, main part and afterword. In the uniform format of 32.5 x 25 cm, they are lined up on a narrow rail without a frame throughout the entire art structure. After the title page are listed the people with ringing pseudonyms from the environment of the artist, who was born in Berlin in 1917 and was murdered in Auschwitz in 1943 when she was five months pregnant.

In a wild mix of genres, the scenes of her life come together like a graphic novel avant la lettre. Street scenes, family celebrations, travel photos, birth, marriage and death announcements, interiors, portraits and landscapes in bright colors alternate with each other, sometimes from a bird’s eye view, sometimes zoomed in, sometimes in an impetuous visual language that is reminiscent of Kirchner, Munch or Chagall .

Escape to southern France

The pictures tell the story of the family, which began four years before Charlotte was born with her aunt’s suicide. Her middle-class childhood in a Jewish assimilated family is overshadowed by the early death of her mother and the rising National Socialism. The father married the singer Paula Lindberg, alias “Paulinka Bimbam”, to whom the musical foundation of the “Singespiel” is probably to be thanked. In 1933, one year before her Abitur, Charlotte left school because of anti-Semitic hostilities and applied to what is now the University of the Arts in 1935, where she actually got a place. A year later she forestalls her exmatriculation in order to flee to her grandparents in southern France.

After German troops invaded in 1940, Charlotte not only witnessed her grandmother’s suicide, but also learned from her grandfather of the suicide of her mother and aunt. With her experiences alone, Charlotte Salomon, after returning from the Gurs internment camp, sees herself faced with the question of “taking her own life or doing something really crazy special”. Programmatically named “Charlotte Kann,” she chose the latter, empowering her alter ego to do this “distressed work.”

Charlotte had already learned a lot about the therapeutic aspects of art from the singing teacher Alfred Wolfssohn, with whom she fell in love as a young girl. As “Amadeaus Daberlohn” he dominates the main part of the “Singespiel”. Traumatized by the First World War, the singing teacher lost his voice, which he was able to regain with the help of a singing technique he developed himself.

After the war, the bundle that Salomon and her husband Alexander Nagler had given to her doctor before the deportation with the words “Keep that safe, it’s my whole life” was passed on to her father, who survived in exile in Holland with his wife had and donated it to the Jewish Museum Amsterdam. Despite numerous exhibitions since the 1960s, including documenta 13 in 2012, as well as scientific, literary, musical and filmic debates, Charlotte Salomon’s life’s work has not achieved the same level of fame as Anne Frank’s diary.

An unconventional survival work

However, a 35-page letter that became known in 2015 will radically change reception. It contains Solomon’s confession that she had poisoned her grandfather, with whom she had a difficult relationship. While Salomon was previously considered a rather childlike artist, one must now recognize a personality that is as complex as it is unfathomable in her surviving work.