Charlotte Salomon

This article is about the author. For the opera, see Charlotte Salomon (opera).
Charlotte Salomon
Charlotte Salomon painting in the garden of the Villa L'Ermitage, Villefranche-sur-Mer, about 1939
Born(1917-04-16)16 April 1917
Berlin, German Empire
Died10 October 1943(1943-10-10) (aged 26)
Auschwitz-Birkenau, German-occupied Poland
Resting place50°02′05″N 19°10′33″E / 50.034752°N 19.175804°E / 50.034752; 19.175804
Notable workLeben? oder Theater?: Ein Singspiel
MovementExpressionism
SpouseAlexander Nagler
FatherAlbert Salomon

Charlotte Salomon (16 April 1917 – 10 October 1943) was a German-Jewish artist born in Berlin. She is primarily remembered as the creator of an autobiographical series of paintings Leben? oder Theater?: Ein Singspiel (Life? or Theater?: A Song-play), the largest known artwork made by a Jewish person who died in the Holocaust,[1] consisting of 769 individual works painted between 1941 and 1943 in the south of France, while Salomon was in hiding from the Nazis. In October 1943 Salomon, 5 months pregnant at that time, was captured and deported to Auschwitz, where she was murdered by the Nazis soon after her arrival.[2][3][4][5] In 2015, a 35-page confession by Salomon to the fatal poisoning of her grandfather, kept secret for decades, was released by a Parisian publisher.[6]

  1. ^ Brown, Kate (18 April 2023). "'She Put Everything Into Art': The Curator of a New Charlotte Salomon Exhibition on How the WWII-Era Artist Painted Through Her Pain". Artnet News. Retrieved 19 April 2023.
  2. ^ Adam C. Stanley, "Salomon, Charlotte (1917–1943)" in Bernard A. Cook, Women and war: a historical encyclopedia from antiquity to the present, Volume 1, ABC-CLIO, 2006, p. 514.
  3. ^ Gilbert, Martin (2002). The Routledge Atlas of the Holocaust. Psychology Press. p. 10. ISBN 978-0-415-28145-4.
  4. ^ Pollock Conceptual Odysseys 2007, pp. 87–88.
  5. ^ Tsjeng, Zing (2 October 2018). Forgotten women : the artists. London. p. 97. ISBN 978-1-78840-063-3. OCLC 1052898455.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  6. ^ "The Obsessive Art and Great Confession of Charlotte Salomon". The New Yorker. 15 July 2017. Retrieved 19 July 2017.