Charlotte Salomon:

Life? or Theatre? A Selection of 450 Gouaches

by Judith C. E. Belinfante and Evelyn Benesch

Taschen America

$35.00 List Price

For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

Origin stories are woven with many threads: Some we spin ourselves, while others we inherit. The great German artist Charlotte Salomon (1917–1943) accounted for herself—for who she was, and why she was, and where she came from—not by wondering what of herself was fact and what was fiction. Rather, the real and present question was Leben? oder Theater? (Life? or Theatre?). In other words, how to distinguish genuine presence and raw experience from the spectacle and folly of human making.

Life? or Theatre? is the title of Salomon’s singular and revelatory masterpiece, which she described very simply as ein Singespiel, “a play with music.” But it isn’t simple: It is a true Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art, at once memoir and novel, script and libretto, painting and music, art object and spirit force. (Salomon herself writes, with little exaggeration, of the “soul-penetrating nature of the work.”) Comprising 769 gouaches on paper alongside 320 transparent overlays on which she has written (or, really, rewritten) her life story, Life? or Theatre? was largely created in a frenzied solitude the artist arranged for herself between the winter of 1941 and the summer of 1942. Apart from a few paintings, the project would be her life’s work: On October 10, 1943, she was exterminated at Auschwitz.

In 2017, in honor of the centenary of Salomon’s birth, two publishers released English translations of Salomon’s project in book form. Taschen put together a selection of 450 gouaches and two essays on the artist; the Overlook Press published a complete edition, which also includes essays,

…