Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory by Griselda Pollock

Abstract

Reviewed by: Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory by Griselda Pollock Julia Watson (bio) Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory Griselda Pollock Yale University Press, 2018, 544 pp. ISBN 9780300100723, $60 hardcover. Eminent British art historian Griselda Pollock's study of Charlotte Salomon's vast visual-textual-musical work Leben? oder Theatre? (Life? or Theatre?) is unquestionably the most sustained, informative, and insightful work on Salomon's Life? or Theatre? to date. Each chapter in Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory evinces extensive research, rich theorizations, and brilliant analysis, drawing on feminist and Jewish studies, psychoanalysis, and theoretical concepts from Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Bracha Ettinger, and Roland Barthes, as well as Freud, Lacan, and Derrida. While Pollock's book appears to be a "single artist" study, it is in fact a much larger intervention into the relationship between the practices of feminist Modernism as part of "art's expanded histories" and the cataclysm of racist fascism in the mid-twentieth century (11). It also offers a provocative challenge to those of us working in auto/biographical studies on how we might recontextualize narration, enrich the discussion of automediality in visual-textual life narrative, and use archival research and wide-ranging theoretical approaches to situate particular artists and writers within the major political and social movements of their time. As interest in Salomon's extraordinary and enigmatic work has grown over the past three decades, parts of it have been shown with increasing frequency: the vast complete work was exhibited at the Jewish Historical Museum (JHM) in 2017–2018 for the centenary of Salomon's birth.1 There have also been operas, theatrical performances, and dance productions based on her work. Biographical studies include seven films and a novel, French writer David Foenkinos's 2014 Charlotte, which was translated into English and German—acclaimed by some, but dismissed by others (including Pollock and myself). Mini-reproductions of one of Salomon's painted self-portraits now appear on magnets and tote bags. Although this rush of attention brought Life? or Theatre? worldwide recognition, it has also been glossed as a work of tragic victimage—a perspective vigorously disputed in Pollock's study. Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory is a handsome volume. Its 7 x 10 inch heavy-stock, case-bound pages include 324 illustrations (most in full color), many of them details of individual paintings; it is printed with generous gutters for annotations. Illustrations are helpfully placed on the pages of the text discussing them, and they are repeated in a different size if alluded to frequently. The book is structured in twelve chapters preceded by a preface and introduction, and concludes with an appendix of Pollock's personal history related to the project, copious endnotes, a list of illustrations, a bibliography, and an index. The preface, "To the Memory of the Nameless," opens with a full-page photograph and discussion of "Passages," the glass-and-steel staircase monument to Walter Benjamin in Port Bou, Spain, where he took his life in 1940 when he was unable to obtain a transit visa to the US. A phrase from one of his last manuscripts is [End Page 125] incised on it: "Historical reconstruction is devoted to the memory of the nameless" (8). A central argument of Pollock's study is that Salomon was "culturally nameless at the point at which she created the work for which her name is now remembered" (9), which impelled her quest to "find a name for myself," as noted in what her biographer Mary Lowenthal Felstiner called her "postscript," the painted-word pages at the end of Life? or Theatre?. Pollock's treatment of Life? or Theatre? is deliberately achronological; each chapter begins with an exploration of one painting from Life? or Theatre? and extends its thematic, aesthetic, and historical implications to related paintings throughout Salomon's work. Pollock is distinctly critical of readings that view Charlotte Salomon's life and death as the core of Life? or Theatre?, arguing that such critical readings—drawn out of and then read back into the work—reduce its accomplishment as a work engaged with the "Event" of the Holocaust and the "Everyday" traumas of...