Art
Mullarkey, Maureen
Art ACT OF EXORCISM CHARLOTTE: LIFE OR THEATER? THE CONTEMPORARY vocabulary of carnage-mega-tonnage and its yield in megadeaths-is utterable only in an age capable of disposing of human beings on...
...Having accomplished the Book, the orphic explanation of things Wolfsohn encouraged her to believe she would one day produce, her work was done...
...Page upon page is given over to his editorializing: "My discovery of the similarity between what young girls produce and what certain geniuses produce is completely justified...
...is very much a sampler of those Expressionist tenets, poses, aspirations, and sources which, by 1940, had lost their innovative character and become a highly fashionable mannerism...
...The omissions, together with the girlish emphasis on love - love wished for, love remembered, love transformed in art - make Life or Theater...
...Considering herself "the living model" of Wolfson's borrowed theories, she was susceptible to Mallarme's pronouncement: "Everything in the cosmos exists to emerge as a great Book...
...Adolph Hitler, like Charlotte Salomon, was a watercolorist...
...introduction by Judith Herzberg...
...As such, it earns its place as a memento mori for each of us, marked men in a nuclear age...
...and the mystico-romantic currents of German Expressionism absorbed from Wolfsohn...
...In 1939, Charlotte Salomon, a twenty-two-year-old Jewish artist, left Berlin for her grandparents' home in southern France...
...Charlotte Salomon had hardly left her youth behind when she began her autobiography...
...All we are told is that her stepmother used her influence...
...rarely attains the force of its derivations...
...The worth of the individual is a cliche made obsolete by the modern state's aptitude for mass slaughter...
...Charlotte's own internment, with her grandfather, in the French camp of Gurs is omitted altogether...
...The Viking Press, $75, 784 pp...
...My hopes, therefore, lie with the future souls of young girls who are willing to tread the path of Christ, the Orpheus path, into themselves...
...Structured as a '' Singspiel," or play with song, the story of her life unfolds at a tinkly, music-hall pace reminiscent of a Weimar cabaret...
...is as characteristic of Life or Theater...
...invites the inevitable comparison to Anne Frank...
...By contrast, her father's incarceration in a labor camp and subsequent release is summarized in four plates, none of them mentioning either the details of his imprisonment, the duration of it, or the reason for his freedom...
...Dear God don't let me go mad.'') that threatened from within...
...There are the occasional references ("Whoever buys from any Jew, himself a filthy swine is too...
...It is impossible to know to what extent this Expressionist limitation on vision made Charlotte Salomon more accessible to the Nazi machinery than she might have been...
...And that those who make it and behold it are not necessarily more humane than those who do not...
...Shortly afterward, the Nazis found her and shipped her to Auschwitz where she died the following year...
...It appears as innocent of the scope of Nazi intention as was the rest of Europe before the summer of 1942...
...Yet the painful suspicion remains that her eager faith in the heady Symbolist connection between the ego and the world, between art and the universe, increased her vulnerability and accelerated the fate she dreaded...
...Unlike Anne Frank, Charlotte had left her youth behind...
...As a work of art, a thing made that demands an allegiance of its own apart from biographical or historical considerations, Life or Theater...
...the stepmother's melancholic voice instructor, Alfred Wolfsohn (called Amadeus Doberlohn in the text, he enters the play to the strains of the Toreador Song from "Carmen...
...Charlotte: Life or Theater?, an autobiographical play by Charlotte Salomon...
...Everything was all right...
...The work proceeds as if the only enemy - indeed, the only entity - were the remembering Self...
...was eventually brought to the attention of the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam...
...A Who's Who of the German intellectual and artistic world at the time, the Novembergruppe formed the core of the modern movement in Germany for all the arts...
...Worked on paper in gouache, a viscous watercolor medium, this chronicle begins before her birth in 1917 and continues through 1940...
...The terror is overwhelmingly personal and the book a talisman more against an ominous family history, clotted with a harrowing number of suicides, than against the Nazi necropolis...
...It makes no effort to understand those idealizations in context or to draw from them whatever conclusions are forthcoming...
...In the inflation-racked economy of Germany between the two world wars, the buying of Expressionist painting had become an alternative to savings and securities...
...The introductory material to this Viking edition accepts at face value Charlotte's idealization of art and of herself as an artist...
...is a testament to the fragile truth that an artist's claim on our attention derives not from art but from the artist's own humanity...
...Its emphasis away from the created object and onto the subjective, creative self, offered younger artists a seeming exemption from the difficulties of craft while simultaneously insuring sales...
...THE CONTEMPORARY vocabulary of carnage-mega-tonnage and its yield in megadeaths-is utterable only in an age capable of disposing of human beings on statistical grounds...
...Consequently, the publication of Charlotte: Life or Theater?*, the painted autobiography of Charlotte Salomon, a young woman murdered at Auschwitz, comes as an attempt to reassert the primacy of a single life against a conceptual world of which Auschwitz was one of the more grisly manifestations...
...Now "everything was all right and she did not have to kill herself like her ancestors, for according to his methods, one can be resurrected...
...Many recollections summon up the family tragedies which fixed Charlotte in the anticipation of some inexorable doom ("I'm afraid it's starting with me too...
...translated from the German by Leila Vennewitz...
...The autobiographical basis of Life or Theater...
...corresponds to her image of herself as aligned with the anti-bourgeois radical elite (most of whom like Charlotte, emerged from bourgeois backgrounds) that initially comprised the Expressionist movement...
...The object of Charlotte's adoration was three-fold: the stepmother...
...Albert Speer, diarist of the Third Reich and the man credited with instituting the slave labor brigades in which Charlotte and her family served, was an accomplished writer...
...as the hero-worship at the heart of it...
...The neglect is regrettable because the common vulnerability of all of us is increased whenever we permit ourselves to forget that art can be put to any human purpose whatever...
...Weill had been an original sponsor of the Novembergruppe, the focal point of cultural life in Berlin from its inception in 1918...
...There, over the next two years, she was driven to painting Life or Theater...
...Recovered after the war by Charlotte's father and stepmother, who survived with the aid of the Dutch underground, Life or Theater...
...She exposed herself to official attention by marrying Nagler against the advice of friends...
...even has its own Lotte Lenya - Charlotte's stepmother, Paulinka, a successful professional singer who loomed large in Charlotte's imagination...
...So she protected her Book by leaving it in safe-keeping while sidestepping what protection there was for herself...
...The early gouaches of childhood trips and celebrations are delightful...
...On the contrary, the project is charged with a keen unripeness, both emotionally and stylistically...
...Everything is subservient to the act of remembering...
...The effects on the father of his time in a slave labor brigade is dispatched in a single plate which depicts him sitting up in bed while the stepmother states: "We'll somehow succeed to get him back on his feet...
...Charlotte: Life or Theater...
...Doubly outcast as Jew and as artist, Weill provided a compelling model for a young Jewish woman emulating the generation of painters who quoted aloud from Thus Spake Zarathustra...
...Each relies for its impact on the audience's knowledge of the circumstances of its production and the monstrousness of the death dealt its author...
...Each work pays scant attention to significant aspects of reality, deriving its full emotive force not from its content but from its history...
...Whether Charlotte's choices were spurred by defiance, naivete, the mechanisms of denial, or by an unconscious surrender to the beckoning of family ghosts can only be sorrowful conjecture...
...Life or Theater...
...All that is given is a single gouache of Charlotte hovering outside a no-Jews-allowed cafe because "After all, it's not that obvious that I'm Jewish...
...The museum's subsequent show of the reordered work moved Dutch film director Franz Weisz, in collaboration with poet Judith Herzberg, to create the screenplay '' Charlotte.'' The release of the film in 1981, coinciding with the inauguration of a new touring exhibition and with the publication of this book, represents a concerted effort to popularize Charlotte's name and work, making it as familiar in this country as it has become in Germany and the Netherlands...
...The power of the work is in its sheer volume, suggestive as it is that the making of it was an obsessive ritual and a race against the time left...
...and followed nearly to completion the university-level training for painters at the Hochschule fur Bildenda Kunst in Berlin...
...Charlotte's gradual collapse into scrawl, while it fails to result in any one convincing image, reinforces a sense of the urgency of its production...
...In these lovingly remembered and densely packed scenes, an unfettered compositional sense and pictorial humor carry the day...
...Youthful bravura ("That which van Gogh achieved later in life, a brushstroke of unprecedented lightness...
...Snippets of dialogue and of the customary sources of Expressionist inspiration (Goethe, Heine, Nietzche, Verlaine, German folk tunes, the music of Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Weber) make up the libretto for what is an effort at an opera of social satire in the vein of Kurt Weill...
...All that is clear, on the evidence of Life or Theater?, is that her involvement with memory, fantasy, and the extravagant claims of art was so intense as to over-balance the actual...
...But the weight of memory collects to a point in an unresolved, partly inciting, partly humiliating, first love affair...
...in two packages of over one thousand annotated gouaches, in the care of the French physician who had sheltered her for a time after the deaths of both grandparents...
...Life or Theater...
...Painted vignettes provide the Acts and Scenes...
...is very much akin to The Diary of Anne Frank...
...Similarly, Charlotte's choice of a Weill-like framework for Life or Theater...
...This egocentric demi-lover, a man with a talent for turning women into disciples, is evoked with the thoroughness of depth psychology and the ferocity and satirical verve of a woman misused...
...Also missing is any word of her marriage to fellow-refugee Alexander Nagler, her pregnancy, the facts of her life in France after release from Gurs, her refusal to go underground...
...And the ease of it is part of its horror because it denies what has since been learned: the full dimensions of the enemy, the nature of the odds...
...This could only have enhanced its appeal to a young art student who was herself outlawed during the Nazi regime...
...The outlawing of such works by the Kulturbund called attention once more to the early political overtones to Expressionism: its anti-authoritarianism, its implicit pacifism, its fervent hopes for Utopian social renewal...
...The handful of plates that refers to the Nazi encroachments on the Jewish community provide little more than a backdrop to the drama of personal remembrance that is Life or Theater?'s motivating concern...
...But what kind of influence did a Jewish woman have with Nazi authorities, with whom and on what grounds...
...Conceived of as a work of art and presented as such in this lavishly printed volume of full-color reproductions, Charlotte: Life or Theater...
...Once made, however, the comparison leads to the recognition that Life or Theater...
...It is the achievement of a personality, of the will rather than of the hand...
...As a relic of the Holocaust, the work is remarkable for its innocence...
...Late in the summer of 1942 Charlotte left Life or Theater...
...Nothing is left unexplored - his pedantry, his conceit, his Christ-complex, his high-strung aestheticism, his disingenuousness, his rhetorical flourishes, his ambiguous sexuality, his morbidity...
...Neither work is self-sustaining...
...Popular acceptance guaranteed its adoption by a succeeding generation of artists...
...MAUREEN MULLARKEY...
...stands as an exquisite reminder that, in the end, the essential thing is to have lived life, not art...
...an "easy" record to read...
...Too few of the gouaches have strength or interest apart from the text which supplies both coherence and meaning...
...Nevertheless, as an act of exorcism, it is a moving document and a stunning achievement...
...This is art denied its status as labor, serving instead as emotional release and a stay against terror...
...Like young girls, certain great men, such as Nietzche, have a boundless yearning to surrender themselves to a particular object...
...Charlotte Salomon was twenty-three when she began work on Life or Theater...
...She refused to go underground, ignoring the urgings of members of the Resistance who argued for it at a time when it was still possible to find shelter in the French mountains...
...They display a playful, whimsical talent that is, however, largely out of kilter with what is attempted and depicted in succeeding plates...
...We have lived to see holocaust itself appropriated by the state as a legitimate instrument of politics...
...I have attained already...
...Expressionism was in vogue, publicized in papers and magazines, promoted by galleries and museums...
...Close to five hundred of the 769 illustrations reproduced here recall Alfred Wolfsohn...
...Judith Belinfante, director of the Jewish Historical Museum, rejects any such parallel in her preface to the Viking edition: "This is unfair to both works - to the adolescent spontaneity of the one as to the conscious artistry of the other...
...but the burden of its attention, its energy, its wit, and its anger is elsewhere...
...Taking possession of the work in 1972, the museum assumed responsibility for arranging the gouaches and the text that they illustrate in their proper sequence...
...From its revolutionary beginnings in the formation of Die Brucke in 1905 until its condemnation by the Nazis in 1937 as "Degenerative Art," Expressionism had come to enjoy wide popularity and a flourishing art market...
...An exponent of radical political and musical ideas, Weill saw his work banned in Germany until after the war...
Vol. 109 • January 1982 • No. 1
