Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943) is renowned for her monumental Life? or Theater?, which comprises 784 paintings the artist created in France between 1941 and 1942, before she was sent to Auschwitz where she was killed in 1943. In this in-depth monograph of the iconic work, Griselda Pollock offers a complex reading of Salomon's unique combination of image, text, and music. Without underestimating the tragic violence of her death in the Holocaust, Pollock seeks to reveal the artist's place within European modernism. In addition to discussing how Salomon's project resonates with the work of those who shared her situation of menaced exile, such as Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, and Hannah Arendt, Pollock reveals how Life? or Theater? raises the issue of sexual abuse of women within the artist's family. Full of close visual analysis, this groundbreaking book offers new insight into Salomon's powerful work in its historical and cultural moment.
Synopsis
Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943) is renowned for a single, monumental, modernist artwork, Life? or Theatre? (Leben? oder Theater?), comprising 784 paintings and created between 1941 and 1942. This major art-historical study sheds new light on the remarkable combination of image, text and music, revealing Salomon's wealth of references to cinema, opera, Berlin cabaret, and the painter's self-consciously deployed modernist engagements with artists such as Van Gogh, Munch and Kollwitz. Additionally, Pollock draws attention to affinities in Salomon's work with that of others who shared her experience of statelessness and menaced exile in Nazi-dominated Europe, including Hannah Arendt, Sigmund Freud, and Walter Benjamin.
In a reading informed by a rich range of insights originating in feminist theories of subjectivity, story-telling, memory, and trauma, Pollock confronts shocking new evidence of the extremity of the young artist's last few months, and discovers in Leben? oder Theater? profound testimony to the everyday crime of familial sexual abuse of women.
Through her comprehensive research and many years of observation of the paintings, Griselda Pollock's account claims for this impressive and important work its rightful place in the art of the 20th century.
Synopsis
A long-awaited, new interpretation of Charlotte Salomon's singular and complex modern artwork, Life? or Theatre?
Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943) is renowned for a single, monumental, modernist artwork, Life? or Theatre? (Leben? oder Theater?), comprising 784 paintings and created between 1941 and 1942. This major art-historical study sheds new light on the remarkable combination of image, text, and music, revealing Salomon's wealth of references to cinema, opera, Berlin cabaret, and the painter's self-consciously deployed modernist engagements with artists such as Van Gogh, Munch, and Kollwitz. Additionally, Griselda Pollock draws attention to affinities in Salomon's work with that of others who shared her experience of statelessness and menaced exile in Nazi-dominated Europe, including Hannah Arendt, Sigmund Freud, and Walter Benjamin.
Confronting new evidence for the extremity of the young artist's last months, Pollock examines this significant work for its equally profound testimony to the crimes of the everyday: the sexual abuse of women in their own families.
Seeking to reconcile the grandeur of this project's sweep of a violent history with its unique testimony to the anguish of women, Pollock challenges the prevailing interpretations of Salomon's paintings as a kind of visual autobiography by threading into her detailed and illuminating visual analyses of the painter's philosophical art-making a dynamic range of insights from feminist and Jewish studies of modern subjectivity, story-telling, memory work, and historical trauma.