Living for creating, painting for staying sane. The complex story-board of Charlotte Salomon

Abstract

The talent of Charlotte Salomon, a young Jewish artist from Berlin, takes shape during Nazism. Her artistic development is concentrated in a single work, Life? Or Theatre?, whereby the author retraces her life in a style bringing together painting with comics, cinema, music. A total work of art as it is embodied in and hinged on her own life, and the only Gesamtkunstwerk is one where the work is an extension of her own existence, where everything becomes art.Salomon?s work is much more than a diary: it is a way of working out grief and mourning, a stratagem for reacting and driving out pain in the madness of Nazi Germany. It is a ‘graphic novel? hybridizing codes and languages with an overflowing expressive power, in which each panel is a story in itself,  it is staged memory, the private and public twentieth-century obscenity dealt with and thought out by means of words, images and music, with characters, dialogues, breaks, changes in perspective.