Charlotte Solomon: “Leben? Oder Theater?” “Life? Or Theater?”

The Jewish Museum, London

8 November 2019 – 1 March 2020

Aside from being one of the most emotionally raw and mature bodies of work I have ever seen, Solomon’s work also posses a level of technical virtuosity and acumen unparalleled in much contemporary artistic production. Solomon was a German Jew who fled to Nice from 1940-42, where she produced this body of work and lived until she was taken to Auschwitz and killed  there in a gas chamber in the aftermath of the Nazi occupation of France. Solomon’s family had a terrible history of mental illness, with which Solomon was forced to grapple alongside the terrors of the Nazi regime’s programs of ethnic cleansing. As a therapeutic outlet for this turmoil, Solomon wrote/created “Leben? Oder Theater?” through which to wrestle and come to terms with her reality. The work is a play, though the word does not fully explicate the complexity of the work. Its characters are stand-ins for the people in Solomon’s inner circle, and the events of their lives are the events of her own. 

Solomon’s artistic style is an incredible amalgamation of Cezanne’s blue outlines, Gauguin’s and Whistler’s planes of colour, and Van Gogh’s imaginative visual compilation, with clear allusions to German expressionists like Feininger and Darger Jr. Unique to Solomon, however, is her conceptualisation of space- it is as if she has made stream of consciousness thought physically manifest itself on her pages. The compositions have a blatant disregard for spatial realities like linear perspective and favour instead a representational multiplicity in which the scene represented plays itself out on the page as it would on a stage. Her serpentine lines unfold the work with multiple actions and temporalities represented at once. Such logic and spatial mastery, almost surrealist in its principles, does the maturity and complexity of Solomon’s thoughts immense justice.

MADE IN BED Contributor

Rebecca Howard