Charlotte Salomon was sixteen when the Nazis came to power in 1933. Despite the severely restricted Jewish student quota, she initially gained admission to the Berlin Academy of Fine Art where she studied for two years until her enrollment was annulled in the summer of 1938. The family decided to leave Germany and Charlotte was sent to France to live with her grandparents, where she commenced the great work that would outlive her short life.
Her extraordinary series of 769 paintings – entitled Life? or Theatre? – was driven by “the question: whether to take her own life (like her mother and several other family members had) or undertake something wildly unusual”.
In the space of two years, she painted over a thousand gouaches, working with feverish intensity. She edited the paintings, re-arranged them, added texts, captions, and overlays. The entire work was a slightly fantastic autobiography preserving the main events of her life – her mother’s death, studying art in the shadow of the Third Reich, her difficult relationship with her grandparents – but altering the names and employing a strong element of fantasy.
Just before being captured by the Nazis, she managed to give her work to a trusted friend with the words, “keep this safe, it is my whole life”. Charlotte was five months pregnant when she and her husband were caught. She was transported to Auschwitz on 7 October 1943 and was probably gassed on the same day that she arrived there (October 10).
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> Charlotte Salomon’s entire collection is at the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam
> Charlotte Salomon in the Jewish women encyclopedia
> “To paint her life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era, available via Amazon
