A biography of Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon, who was born in Germany in 1917, and exiled to France in 1939 where she spent the next two years creating a lifetime's work--765 watercolors overlaid by written texts and tunes that captured the dramatic events of her life--finally to be transported to Auschwitz where she was a victim of the genocide in 1943. Includes 64 bandw photographs throughout and an 8-page color insert. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This is the cathartic masterpiece of Charlotte Salomon. Entrusted to a friend before her deportation to Auschwitz, her gouache series Life? or Theater? live on as an artistic feat beyond category or comparison. Published here with the 450 most important pieces, including film-like sequences and musical suggestions, this fictional autobiography...

This is a poignant and graphic telling of the life of a young German Jewish woman taken and killed during the holocaust. Charlotte Salomon (Berlin, 16/04/17 - Auschwitz, 10/10/43) was an artist from a prosperous family whose mother committed suicide when she was just nine-years-old. One of several suicides within her family. She attended the School for Pure and Applied Arts until 1938 when the increasing antisemitic policies caused her to escape to the south of France to live with her grandparents. It was not the best of times. In 1941, now living alone she began painting what became over 1000 gouaches which she edited and added captions and overlays to create her life's work 'Leben? Oder Theater?' consisting of 769 of the paintings depicting a somewhat fantastical autobiography preserving the main elements of her life. She also made notes on appropriate music to accompany the art. In 1943 she handed the work over to the local doctor in a large suitcase with the wish that he "Keep this safe, it is my whole life." She had addressed it to wealthy American, Ottillie Moore in whose property she had stayed. By September that year she had married another German Jewish refugee, Alexander Nagler, and the two of them were arrested and she was transported to Auschwitz to the gas chambers when five months pregnant.

In the face of strong moral and aesthetic pressure to deal with the Holocaust in strictly historical and documentary modes, this book discusses why and how reenactment of the Holocaust in art and imaginative literature can be successful in simultaneously presenting, analyzing, and working through this apocalyptic moment in human history. In pursuing his argument, the author explores such diverse materials and themes as: the testimonies of Holocaust survivors; the works of such artists and writers as Charlotte Salomon, Christian Boltanski, and Armando; and the question of what it means to live in a house built by a jew who was later transported to the death camps. He shows that reenactment, as an artistic project, also functions as a critical strategy, one that, unlike historical methods requiring a mediator, speaks directly to us and lures us into the Holocaust. We are then placed in the position of experiencing and being the subjects of that history. We are there, and history is present--but not quite. A confrontation with Nazism or with the Holocaust by means of a re-enactment takes place within the representational realm of art. Our access to this past is no longer mediated by the account of a witness, by a narrator, by the eye of a photographer. We do not respond to a re-presentation of the historical event, but to a presentation or performance of it, and our response is direct or firsthand in a different way. That different way of "keeping in touch” is the subject of inquiry that propels this study.

Featuring contributions from prominent art historians, literary and cultural critics, and historians, Reading Charlotte Salomon celebrates the genius and courage of a remarkable figure in twentieth-century art.

Knafo, a feminist psychoanalyst and art critic, extends the discourse between feminism and art history, while revealing core psychological sensibilities involved in women's self-representation - the need for mirroring, the use of mask and masquerade, the drive for reparation, the presence of the uncanny, and the concept of female narcissism. --Publisher.

Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943) was a painter from Berlin who fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and spent the last years of her life at her grandparents' home in the south of France. Her grandmother's suicide led Charlotte to paint a dramatized autobiography in an extensive series of gouaches. In this autobiography, all the people that were important to her are brought to life in a special way: her father, her stepmother Paula Lindberg, the singing teacher Alfred Wolfsohn, her fellow students and teachers at the Arts Academy, her grandparents. The original paintings are in the possession of the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam.