Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory

A long-awaited, new interpretation of Charlotte Salomons singular and complex modern artwork, Life? or Theatre? Charlotte Salomon (19171943) is renowned for a single, monumental, modernist artwork, Life? or Theatre? (Leben? oder Theater?), comprising 784 paintings and created between 1941 and 1942. This major arthistorical study sheds new light on the remarkable combination of image, text, and music, revealing Salomons wealth of references to cinema, opera, Berlin cabaret, and the painters selfconsciously deployed modernist engagements with artists such as Van Gogh, Munch, and Kollwitz. Additionally, Griselda Pollock draws attention to affinities in Salomons work with that of others who shared her experience of statelessness and menaced exile in Nazidominated Europe, including Hannah Arendt, Sigmund Freud, and Walter Benjamin. Confronting new evidence for the extremity of the young artists last months, Pollock examines this significant work for its equally profound testimony to the crimes of the everyday: the sexual abuse of women in their own families. Seeking to reconcile the grandeur of this projects sweep of a violent history with its unique testimony to the anguish of women, Pollock challenges the prevailing interpretations of Salomons paintings as a kind of visual autobiography by threading into her detailed and illuminating visual analyses of the painters philosophical art-making a dynamic range of insights from feminist and Jewish studies of modern subjectivity, story-telling, memory work, and historical trauma.