Author(s): Judith C. E. Belinfante (Author) , Evelyn Benesch (Author)

Art

Painting For Her Life Charlotte Salomon's artistic feat under the Third Reich When German artist Charlotte Salomon (1917 1943) handed her gouache series Life or Theater over to a friend, she beseeched him to 'take good care of it, it is my entire life.' A few months later, the five months pregnant Charlotte was picked up by a Gestapo truck, deported to Drancy, and then on to Auschwitz, where she died upon arrival at the age 26. Trauma haunts many of the pages, but there is defiance, too. Born of a family plagued by depression, the work Salomon left behind is, in a very real sense, her piece de resistance in her own words, something wildly eccentric. A cycle of nearly 1,300 autobiographical gouaches, it combines creative force with pioneering personal narrative into one shattering document of self expression.