To Paint Her Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era

by Mary Lowenthal Felstiner

A courageous Jewish artist who left behind a monumental archive of paintings comes alive in this extraordinary biography. Charlotte Salomon, born in Germany in 1917, exiled to France in 1939, spent the next 2 intense, suspenseful years creating a lifetime's work--more than 700 watercolors overlaid by written texts and tunes that captured the dramatic events of her own life. This luminous work stands alone in the history of art and of autobiography. It is the most innovative record we have from the midst of the Holocaust, a visual path through those dark times. Salomon's work survives intact in Amsterdam, but until now no one has unfolded the real life behind the painted one. Mary Felstiner spent 10 years of searching for & interviewing Salomon's relatives & classmates, her mentor's students, her acquaintances in exile, & survivors of the concentration camps. Felstiner shapes an immensely moving account of a woman haunted by personal trauma & trapped in grim historical conditions. TO PAINT HER LIFE resounds with the artist's own words & images. We see her losing her mother to suicide. Being admitted to the prestigious Berlin Art Academy and then expelled. Witnessing the rising tide of Nazism. Falling in love & suffering loss. Leaving her home for exile on the Riviera. Choosing whether to take her own life--or to put it into art. Painting secrets her family kept from her & secrets she kept from them. Making choices that speak to us all--to love someone, to leave a home, to face memories, to recount it all. TO PAINT HER LIFE also traces a shadow story behind Charlotte Salomon's--that of Alois Brunner, Eichmann's right-hand man, the notorious SS officer responsible for deporting to death camps more than 100,000 Jews. With Salomon & Brunner representing creation and destruction in sharp contrast, Felstiner brings together previously unknown facts of their 2 lives & opens provocative ne perspectives on gender and genocide.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Art, Biography, Holocaust, World War II, Jewish

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Mary Lowenthal Felstiner received her B.A. degree at Harvard, her M.A. at Columbia and her Ph.D. at Stanford. Since 1981 she has taught history at San Francisco State University. Her major research on Charlotte Salomon culminated in To Paint Her Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era, which in 1995 won both the Women’s Heritage Museum First Annual Book Award and the American Historical Association Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in Women’s History. Her most recent work, Out of Joint: A Public and Private Story of Arthritis (2005), has as its genesis her own experiences of a chronic health problem.

(from http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/author/fe...)

Reviews

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the early 1980’s, while browsing the discount table at my favorite bookstore of the time (Orr Books in Uptown Minneapolis, RIP), I stumbled on this huge art book from Viking Press simply titled Charlotte, which featured the entirety of German Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon’s magnum opus, Life? Or Theater? This autobiographical work consists of 769 unforgettably expressive and powerful gouache paintings with accompanying text, covering in rich detail her childhood in Berlin, dark family secrets of multiple suicides, her education in art school, and her obsessive love affair with her stepmother’s brilliant but eccentric voice teacher, all against the backdrop of the growing menace of the Nazi regime. Salomon, desperate to create meaning out of the chaos and despair of her life and times, worked obsessively from 1941-1943 to complete her story while living in exile in France. Some months after completing the work she was ultimately captured and killed by the Nazis in late 1943. Thankfully, her work was saved. Charlotte and Life Or Theater made a huge impact on me and I’ve kept them close to my heart ever since. Charlotte is still not as well known as she should be, though over the years there have been more and more exhibitions of Life or Theater internationally and even a non-fiction film or two covering her life and work. I tell people about her all the time, but the book, being the doorstop that it is, is not an easy lender.

Then, in late 1998, while visiting London, I chanced upon a poster in the Tube station advertising an exhibit of Life? Or Theater? at the Royal Academy, going on right then, that very month! I dragged my boyfriend of the time there, posthaste. The power of seeing Charlotte’s paintings in front of me – something I hadn’t ever thought would happen - was indescribable. I left the gallery overcome with emotion, barely able to speak for a time (the BF was very understanding). To this day it’s the shining moment of all my years of museum and gallery hopping - the closest I’ve ever had to experiencing the Stendhal Syndrome. I since have really come to see Life or Theater as an early graphic novel; perhaps that is why its inspiration has been so powerful to me. The blending of words and pictures to tell a story, there's nothing else like it.

Anyway, this book by Mary Lowenthal Felstiner – the one I’m supposed to be commenting upon here - is a valuable companion to the art book discussed above, filling in many of the biographical blanks that Charlotte’s mix of fiction and fact work couldn’t possibly have offered, and providing a more detailed portrait of the times in which she lived, worked, and died. Reading about the atrocities of the Nazi regime is always extremely painful and infuriating, but Ms. Felstiner interweaves all this history, biography, and analysis quite artfully, reminding us in the end that Charlotte’s art has lived on, triumphantly (Never Forget, as we are always reminded). Anyone who has appreciated Salomon's work will undoubtedly find this a necessary read. Five stars.
Charlotte Salamon: Life or Theater?

[Lynn Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author did an excellent job of explaining in detail the opera of paintings the artist created as well as the story of her life. It was so hard to image the life Charlotte Salomon had to endure., but it was well documented in the book.

[Christopher C. Gorham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written and awe-inspiring in terms of research.