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Charlotte Salomon's great and strange work Life? or Theater? A Song-Play incorporates word, image and music in ways that challenge aesthetic containment and definition. The Degenerate Art Exhibition of 1937-1938 was an important source for Salomon's innovative mixture of word and image. Where the Degenerate Art Exhibition's text served to label, vilify, condemn and erase, Salomon's use of text emphasizes ambiguity, not fixity. It layers the art rather than effacing it. Most importantly, it rejects the Nazi attack on Jewish German artists and people by reclaiming both art and language. Salomon's creation of a künstlerroman soon after The Nazis' display of repression and purgation defied the Kunst politik of the regime. Her project was all the more perilous because of her family history of mental illness. Salomon's use of expressionist conventions and of image-text became elements of a therapeutic technique, a means of telling the story of her own life.
Keywords: Charlotte Salomon / degenerate art / modernism / mental illness / word and image
Charlotte Salomon's great and strange work Life? or Theater?A Song-Play- play, picture book, prayer book, roman a clef, act of imagination-is a chimeric artwork incorporating word, image and music in ways that challenge aesthetic containment and definition. Salomon created the work in isolation while in hiding in the South of France between 1940 and 1942, painting and drawing 1,325 pages of image and text. In the first 220 pages, textual narrative overlays the paintings on thin semi-transparent paper. The later paintings incorporate text directly into the imagery. Salomon included almost 800 paintings in the approved series without discarding the remainder, then entrusted the whole to a local friend, Dr. Georges Moridis, with the words, "Keep this safe. It is my whole life" (Felstiner x).
Salomon was arrested in late September 1943, and put on a transport from Drancy to Auschwitz in early October. She was pregnant, and was sent to the gas chamber upon her arrival. Her work stayed hidden throughout the war. After the war ended, it was returned first to Ottilie Moore, who owned the villa where Salomon had taken refuge, and then to her father and stepmother, who had spent the last years of the war in hiding in Amsterdam. When her parents opened the trunk,...