Charlotte Salomon's 800 Works to Debut at Amsterdam Jewish Museum

The Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam will host the first exhibition of approximately 800 works by German-Jewish painter Charlotte Salomon (Berlin, 1917 – Auschwitz, 1943) from October 2017 to March 2018. Salomon died at age 26 in Auschwitz, but left a vast oeuvre including the autobiographical series "Leben? Oder Theatre?" (Life? Or Theater?), a painted diary of 769 works created between 1941 and 1943 while hiding in southern France. Captured in October 1943, she was deported to Auschwitz and killed in a gas chamber days later, along with her unborn child. The exhibition aims to move beyond biographical tragedy and grant the works artistic dignity. Curator Mirjam Knotter notes the ambiguity between reality and fiction in Salomon's work. In 2015, French publisher Le Tripode released a complete reproduction of "Leben? Oder Theatre?" including a 35-page letter to her lover Alfred Wolfson confessing to poisoning her grandfather, written in reddish-brown watercolor resembling dried blood. Salomon's mother died by suicide when she was nine. Despite Nazi Nuremberg Laws barring Jews from public education, she gained admission to Berlin's School of Applied Arts and excelled until forced to flee Germany. In two years, while relatives committed suicide to avoid Nazi capture, she painted nearly 800 works with texts and captions. A 2011 solo exhibition at the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco featured over 300 works. The artist also inspired a poetry volume by Anne Barrows.