Abstract
This chapter discusses Charlotte Salomon’s Life? or Theatre?, a sequence of 784 paintings created between 1940 and 1942 by a young German-Jewish artist. Focusing upon three key paintings within the cycle, and in particular their representations of open windows, this chapter argues that Life? or Theatre? is a complex, kaleidoscopic rendering of multiple graphic life stories, which can be opened up and better understood through the vocabulary of comics criticism. By focusing on the spaces between pages—the gutter—this chapter exposes how these are vital, generative gaps charged with meaning. In so doing it challenges reductive, biographical readings of Salomon’s life and work, insisting that Life? or Theatre? is a visual and textual representation of many life narratives, taking on the shapeshifting form of an epic, reiterative cycle.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Although several published versions of Life? orTheatre? exist in English translation, references here are to the complete digitized work, hosted on the Jewish Historical Museum’s website: https://charlotte.jck.nl/section. This online version includes Salomon’s accompanying transparent text sheets along with the unnumbered gouaches which were typically rejected in previous, printed editions. Exact paintings are referenced using the Jewish Historical Museum’s numeration. For a full, English translated printed edition, see Salomon (1998).
- 2.
Early printed editions ofLife? or Theatre? discuss the work as if it were a diary, selectively removing Salomon’s references to both sex and violence, while naming ‘Charlotte’ as a sensitive, intuitive girl whose paintings showed her ‘opening her heart and pouring forth her images’ (Tillich and Straus 1963). The problematic legacy of this ideal, child-victim, who is deprived of artistic agency by the removal of her surname, is repeated by the numerous plays and operas focussing upon the tragic events of Salomon’s life, and particularly her murder in Auschwitz at the age of 26, rather than her exceptional skill as an artist. The enduring fascination with her biography, rather than her remarkable creations, finds its culmination in David Foenkinos’ recent novel, Charlotte (2014). Griselda Pollock rightly rejects such readings of Salomon’s work that, set on reducing her paintings to self-portraiture, ‘commit a classic gendered and gendering move to reduce the artist who is woman to an intimate first name’ (Pollock2006: 34).
- 3.
These arguments respond to Perry Nodelman’s influential study Words About Pictures (1988) in which he argues that each page within a picturebook ‘is conceived as only part of a large whole that also includes text and other pictures’ (126). The result being that each single picture is both part of a broader narrative and a source of tension as the reader must turn the page in anticipation of the next image in the sequence. This creates, for Nodelman, a process of imbalance which only concludes with the book’s final page.
- 4.
Recent scholarship on graphic life narratives has suggested that ‘the form of comics has a peculiar relation to expressing life stories’ (Chute 2011: 2; see also El Refaie 2012; Kunka 2017; Whitlock 2006). Numerous critics have outlined how modern graphic memoirs, exemplified by Art Spiegelman’sThe Complete Maus (1996) or Marjane Satrapi’sPersepolis (2006), ‘open up new and troubled spaces’ for self-representation (Whitlock 2006: 976). These scholars contend that what Chute calls the ‘spatial syntax’ of comics demands new critical approaches capable of discussing graphic life narratives (Chute 2016: 4). These ongoing conversations lay the important framework for a critical reading of Life? orTheatre? not as a ‘true’ representation of Salomon’s life (thus conflating the multi-modal forms of her work into a memoir or visual diary), but as a complex, experimental graphic narrative.
- 5.
Although many critics have wrestled with the right terminology for discussing Life? orTheatre? most view Salomon’s paintings as an epic memory project. Pollock has repeatedly described it as a ‘theatre of memory’ (2006: 57), which explores a labyrinth of personal histories, while Mary Lowenthal Felstiner, in her biography of Salomon, describes it as ‘an autobiography without an I’ (1994: xi). In the single edited collection dedicated to Salomon’s work, her paintings are viewed as a means of understanding history as both narrative and trauma.
- 6.
These include, but are not confined to, David Foenkinos’ recent novel, Charlotte (2014), Marc-André Dalbavie’s opera Charlotte Salomon (2014), and a forthcoming animated biopic of Salomon scheduled to be directed by Bilbo Bergeron.
Works Cited
Austin, Carolyn. 2008. The Endurance of Ash: Melancholia and the Persistence of the Material in Charlotte Salomon’s Leben? Oder Theater? Biography 31.1: 103–132.
Buerkle, Darcy C. 2013. Nothing Happened: Charlotte Salomon and an Archive of Suicide. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Chute, Hillary. 2010. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia University Press.
———. 2011. Comics Form and Narrating Lives. Profession 2011: 107–117.
———. 2016. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Davies, Dominic. 2019. Urban Comics: Infrastructure and the Global City in Contemporary Graphic Narratives. London: Routledge.
Eisner, Will. 1985. Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist. Florida: Poorhouse Press.
El Refaie, Elisabeth. 2012. Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.
Felstiner, Mary Lowenthal. 1994. To Paint Her Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era. New York: HarperCollins.
Foenkinos, David. (2016) 2014. Charlotte. Trans. by Sam Taylor. New York: The Overlook Press.
Freedman, Ariela. 2014. Charlotte Salomon, Graphic Artist. In Graphic Details: Jewish Women’s Confessional Comics in Essays and Interviews, ed. Sarah Lightman, 38–51. Jefferson: McFarland & Company.
Groensteen, Thierry. 2007. The System of Comics. Trans. by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Kunka, Andrew J. 2017. Autobiographical Comics. London: Bloomsbury.
Labio, Catherine. 2015. The Architecture of Comics. Critical Inquiry 41 (2): 312–343.
McCloud, Scott. (1993) 1994. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperCollins.
McConnell, Sarah. 2019. Illustration in Motion: Sequential Momentum in Children’s Illustrated Books. In A Companion to Illustration: Art and Theory, ed. Alan Male, 140–159. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell.
Nodelman, Perry. 1988. Words About Pictures: The Narrative Art of Children’s Picture Books. London: The University of Georgia Press.
Poletti, Anna, and Gillian Whitlock. 2008. Self-Regarding Art. Biography 31 1: v–xxiii.
Pollock, Griselda. 2006. Theater of Memory: Trauma and Cure in Charlotte Salomon’s Modernist Fairy Tale: Leben? oder Theater? 1940–42. In Reading Charlotte Salomon, ed. Monica Bohm-Duchen and Michael P. Steinberg, 34–72. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
———. 2018. Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory. New York: Yale University Press.
Rose, Jacqueline. 2014. Women in Dark Times. London: Bloomsbury.
Salomon, Charlotte. 1998. Life? or Theatre? Zwolle: Waanders Publishers.
———. 2017. Life? or Theatre?. Accessed 11 Apr 2019. https://charlotte.jck.nl/section
Schmetterling, Astrid. 1998. Life? or Theatre? The “Wildly Unusual” Work of Charlotte Salomon. Jewish Quarterly 45 (3): 48–54.
Schultz, Deborah, and Edward Timms. 2009. Pictorial Narrative in the Nazi Period: Felix Nussbaum, Charlotte Salomon and Arnold Daghani. New York: Routledge.
Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. 2002. Interfaces: Women/Autobiography/Image/Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
———. 2010. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Tillich, Paul, and Emil Straus. 1963. Charlotte: A Diary in Pictures. London: Collins.
Whitlock, Gillian. 2006. Autographics: The Seeing “I” of Comics. Modern Fiction Studies 42 (4): 965–980.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Parker, E. (2020). ‘To Create Her World Anew’: Charlotte Salomon’s Graphic Life Narrative. In: Davies, D., Rifkind, C. (eds) Documenting Trauma in Comics. Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37998-8_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37998-8_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-37997-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-37998-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)