Isn’t it just the way to look for one thing and find another?
I was looking for the biography of another female artist for my next Celebration of Female Artists blog, but I found the incredible story of Charlotte Salomon.
And I needed to know more . . .
Charlotte Salomon (1917 –1943) was a German-Jewish artist born in Berlin in a prosperous family, though her mother, Franziska, committed suicide when Charlotte was eight years old. She started attending State Art Academy in Berlin, in 1936, despite its restricting quota for Jewish students. She studied painting and discovered the modern art of Matisse, Munch, and Chagall in books from the library that had not yet been banned and removed. In 1938, Salomon won the Academy’s prestigious annual prize in painting, However, since she was Jewish, Salomon was not allowed to receive the prize in public. She left the school soon after. She also learned of thr long line of family members who committed suicide. The news was a shock for Salomon, who feared succumbing to the same tragic end herself. After her grandfather’s repeated sexual abuse, a local doctor and friend advised Charlotte to paint as therapy for depression.* She rented a room in the pension La Belle Aurore in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, the peninsula that juts out east of Nice in the Ligurian Sea. In the space of two years, she painted over one thousand gouaches. She edited the paintings, re-arranged them, and added texts, captions, and overlays.
Forced to hide from the Nazis in the south of France in Villefranche-sur-Mer near Nice, she lived in a cottage in the grounds of a luxurious villa L’Ermitage (now demolished) owned by a wealthy American, Ottilie Moore, who went on to shelter a number of Jewish children. By September 1943, Salomon had married another German Jewish refugee, Alexander Nagler.
As the Nazis intensified their search for Jews living in the South of France, Salomon handed her work to her doctor friend and addressed it to Ottilie Moore. Charlotte told the doctor: “Keep this safe, it is my whole life.” Charlotte and her husband were dragged from their house and transported by rail from Nice to Auschwitz, where she and her unborn child were murdered by the Nazis soon after her arrival.
Moore, who passed on the package to Charlotte’s remaining family, only received the package upon her return to Europe in 1947, after the war’s end. In 1971, the collection was placed in the care of The Joods Museum in Amsterdam, dedicated to Jewish history, culture, and religion, the only museum in the Netherlands dedicated to Jewish history.
In 1981 the Museum presented 250 of Salomon’s work in narrative sequence, and critics began to comment on the work. A 1998 exhibition at London’s Royal was an unexpected sensation, helped by the publication of a complete catalogue.
Several plays based on her life and work have been created since the 1980s as well as a movie Charlotte, a documentary, and an opera, showing the impact of Salomon’s life and art.
*In 2015, a 35-page confession by Salomon to the fatal poisoning of her grandfather, kept secret for decades, was released by a Parisian publisher.
