Life? Or Theatre? by Charlotte Salomon

Abstract

Reviewed by: Life? Or Theatre?by Charlotte Salomon Chloe Julius (bio) Keywords museology, Britain, Holocaust Charlotte Salomon: Life? Or Theatre?Jewish Museum London, 11 8, 2019– 03 1, 2020 "How beautiful life is. I believe in life! I will live for them all!" —Charlotte Salomon, Life? Or Theatre?, 1941–1943 Like many of its contemporaries in Europe and the United States, the Jewish Museum in London has made death its subject. While the museum exists to memorialize both Jewish life and Jewish lives, in its narration of the history of British Jewry, endings are given precedence over beginnings. In one display, the East End of the early twentieth century is revived through a miniature recreation of one of its streets. In another, filmed testimonies of Holocaust survivors who settled in Britain after the war are relayed alongside vitrines containing their artifacts from Nazi Europe. Approximating shrines, these displays call attention not to the livingthat happened in either the East End or Europe, but rather the absence of these Jewish worlds from the contemporary landscape. In the rare instances where Jewish presence is emphasized, certain fissures emerge, for example, in the gap that opens between the ceremonial objects exhibited in the display Living Faith, and the predominantly secular leanings of those photographed for Through a Queer Lens Portraits: Portraits of LGBTQ Jews. The sum of these various parts does not amount to a whole; on the contrary, the intended effect is to offer a portrait of British Jewry that is fatally incomplete. At first blush, the Jewish Museum's presentation of Charlotte Salomon's Life? Or Theatre?, 1941–1943slots comfortably into its broader typography. Death is both the subject and context of this multi-gouache work, [End Page 281]the narrative of which follows a family devastated by multiple suicides, and whose author was murdered in Auschwitz. Born in Berlin in 1917, Salomon's short lifespan of twenty-six years covered a period of extreme transformation in Germany, bookended as it was by two world wars, and containing within it the rise and fall of the Weimar Republic and the accelerating grip of the Nazi Party over Europe. Life? Or Theatre?traces the contours of Salomon's life without submitting to autobiography's attendant confessions: friends, lovers, and family members are given pseudonyms, and Salomon speaks with and through each of them. This polyvocality is enabled by Salomon's varied use of language; the majority of the work's 769 gouaches include painted text and an overlaid caption, as well as musical cues that give shape to the work's subtitle as a "play with music." Among this chorus, a central protagonist emerges—Charlotte Kann—whose frustrated attempt to pursue an artistic career in an increasingly hostile 1930s Berlin establishes the work's principal theme of unrealized potential, a theme that is mirrored in the experiences of the wider cast of German Jewish characters. Grieving, seemingly, offers itself as a valid aesthetic response to Life? Or Theatre?, which offers a window into a Berlin that once was, and an artist that is no longer. It is in this second sense that the Salomon presentation joins arms with an earlier exhibition mounted by the Jewish Museum, Amy Winehouse: Family Portrait. That Winehouse was both Jewish and a Camden local—where the museum is located—ostensibly justified the exhibition, which was mounted just two years after the singer tragically died aged twenty-seven. Yet that the exhibition was staged again in 2018 in a largely unaltered form suggested something else was at play. Demonstrably, for London's Jewish Museum, mourning sells, and this particular commemorative display drew in a previously untapped audience of grievers. However, what distinguishes the museum's Winehouse presentation from the Salomon one is that in the latter exhibition the work itself was given precedent. Whereas visitors to Amy Winehouse: Family Portraitwishing to pay their respects found a collection of ephemera on which to hang their anguish, potential mourners in Life? Or Theatre?discovered a wholly different proposition. Salomon—and Winehouse for that matter—affirmed life. While an artist's early death undoubtedly punctures the experience of their art, this [End Page 282] Click for larger view...