Charlotte Salomon’s Art In Conjunction With Tragedy
Charlotte Salomon was born in 1917 in Berlin, Germany to a Jewish family. She would grow up surrounded by Berlin’s vibrant art scene with the emerging artform of film inspiring a great deal of her artwork. However, her life was heavily coated in tragedy of many forms. Her own mother comitted suicide when she was just eight years old, though she was told her mother died of influenza and would not learn of the true cause of death until adulthood. Salomon’s stepmother, Paula Lindberg would introduce Salomon to the art world and they would support each other in their creative endeavors. With the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, Charlotte was forced to flee Germany to southern France.
In France, Charlotte still did not escape tragedy. In her first year there, she witnessed her grandmother’s suicide. Determined to not go mad, Salomon threw herself into art-making to document her life and existence. While she had been classically trained in Berlin’s State Art Academy (something that was difficult and impressive due to their limiting the Jewish student population to just 1.5% of the total), she also found great inspiration in modern artists such as Henri Matisse, and took efforts to develop a style that echoed that of the artists she admired. Her expressive artworks conveyed both her inspiration and her struggle to maintain her own mental health while surrounded by the looming presence of the Nazis and the later knowledge of her family’s long history of suicide.
Tragically, Charlotte was not able to escape the holocaust even as she evaded the Nazis by moving from country to country. It was when she was visiting her grandfather in Nice, France that she was brought to Auschwitz and murdered along with her unborn child, her husband would die of exhaustion in the same camp three months later. Record of Salomon and her art remains because of Charlotte’s desperate desire to preserve the memory of her own existence. She documented much of her life in her bold, expressive style. Thanks to her efforts to document her life extensively, Charlotte’s parents were able to recover a large portion of her life’s work after the war. They were able to donate the art pieces to the Jewish Historical Museum of Amsterdam, where they remain to this day.
Charlotte created an enormous amount of artwork documenting the war with a great many styles, expressing a great range of emotions. Her family remembered her as a shy woman, but with a great vibrancy. Though they lost all correspondence with her through letters, her artwork brought a new connection. Thousands of autobiographical paintings and drawings made by their late daughter detailing their time apart. They saw her sadness, and they saw her vibrancy. Every painting was a window into her mind, seeing how she viewed them, seeing when she was low and when she was in love with life, seeing her on a page. She’s known as a woman who always smiled and was never cheerful, a shy introvert. A woman who loved her parents and her husband, and who lived in times of great darkness. She is remembered in all of these ways because of her paintings, reaching through time to show you her mind in bright gouaches and pencil sketches.
Charlotte Salomon was a woman drowning in tragedy, killed in a mass genocide. She was also tirelessly dedicated to recording her life. It is because of this that we know about her and her distinctive, modern artworks today. Even though she was killed, Charlotte Salomon’s work ensures she lives forever.
“Charlotte Salomon Biography, Life & Quotes.” The Art Story,
www.theartstory.org/artist/salomon-charlotte/life-and-legacy/.
Felstiner, M., 2020. Charlotte Salomon | Jewish Women’s Archive. [online] Jewish
Women’s Archive. Available at:
https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/salomon-charlotte 23
September 2020
