In Charlotte Salomon's extraordinary Life? or Theater? A Play withMusic--a kind of unbound epic, composed of more than 700 watercolor panels plus text and suggestions for accompanying music--the painted curtains rise on Berlin, 1913. A young woman, named Charlotte, is floating blue-faced in her coffin. She has drowned herself. This exhibit, which features about half of the total work, recently left the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and is now at the Jewish Museum of NewYork. Only moments into it, we can already sense the contradictions that will propel it forward. Here is life--or is it theater?--compressed into two dimensions and nonetheless exploding off the paper. (In one of the exhibit's first page-size panels, there are 27 different swiftly dabbed images of the young woman leaving her apartment, walking through the streets, approaching the river, and sinking under the water.) Here is cartooning--or, with its sometimes comic, rhyming text, is it cabaret?--that asks itself the most serious of questions: Why live? Why suffer? Why art?
Created between 1940 and 1942, Life? or Theater? is the forebear of today's serious "graphic novels," such as Art Spiegelman'sMaus and Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan. It is a multimedia project put together before the term was even coined. And the exhibit does sometimes creak with age. Yet in the complexity of its portraits and the unsentimental honesty of its gaze, it still seems to be leading the way. Salomon's work demonstrates how a story can be built, layer upon layer--image upon text, event upon melody, expression of the self upon impression of the world--until it approaches both the messy fullness of life and the trimmed and shaped clarity of theater.
Four years pass. The dead woman's sister gives birth to a littlegirl, our protagonist, and names her Charlotte. Cut to 1926. The childis nine years old. Her mother, tormented by an increasingly oppressivesense that nothing comes of anything, throws herself from a window. WhenCharlotte is in her early twenties, she will find her grandmother--theone whose two daughters committed suicide--hanging half-dead in thebathroom and, later, crumpled on the ground outside her window, asuicide herself.
In outline, this is Salomon's own grim family history, althoughnothing is straightforward in Life? or Theater? We don't know how much is memoir and how much is fiction. Or is the work's title itself deceptive, pressing us to choose between life and art, when there's actually no clear boundary between the two? This is, after all, a story that seems headed over the edge of a precipice, or out a window, until suddenly--or maybe not so suddenly--we find that the subject has changed. It is not about dying anymore, but about creating. Charlotte's father has married Paulinka Bimbam, a celebrated opera singer, whom the child adores--first on stage and then in life. And later Paulinka hires Amadeus Daberlohn, an alternately brilliant and ridiculous voice teacher, who insists that true art can come only through tremendous suffering and who proceeds to obsess about his own artistic destiny like an ill-tempered Woody Allen.
With Daberlohn's entrance, Salomon begins painting dialoguedirectly onto her watercolors rather than printing it on overlaidtracing paper. Indeed, Daberlohn's words--in blue block letters--oftencircle the page, winding in and around his figure, almost drowning him.Like the cry of a baby, Daberlohn tells Paulinka, art is primal andpre-verbal; it draws its power from the artist's confrontation withmortality. By embracing death, the artist can be reborn, Christlike,into a world of creative possibility. Paulinka, he says, has dulled hergift by attending to the trivial details of married life.
Daberlohn's grandiose theories are a terrific caricature of the ideasthat inspired German expressionist artists of the time. Sarcastically,Salomon cues the voice teacher's first entrance to the melodramatic,almost hokey strains of the "Toreador's Song" from Carmen. With even less charity, she at times paints his face glowing fiendishly red and orange, his eyes bulging. But setting layer upon layer, she builds a total picture of him that is more ambiguous--and more interesting. Paulinka finds Daberlohn by turns compelling and irritating, but under his tutelage, she shines on stage (in the role of Orpheus, a hero who, fittingly enough, must descend into the underworld in order to recover his lost love).
Similarly, Salomon, for all the fun she pokes at Daberlohn, dedicatesmore than half of her own exploration of the birth of anartist--Charlotte--to consideration of his theories, and she awards hima full-blown love affair with her heroine. In implicit defiance ofDaberlohn, Salomon takes for her own subject the very dramas ofdomesticity that he dismisses, and many of her work's most resonantmoments arise out of this "trivia"--Charlotte's first furious adolescentfight with her beloved stepmother, who at that moment is called her"lover"; her sinking feeling when Daberlohn tells her that she isdestined to create something "above average." Yet Salomon also paintsthese panels in a dreamily intense expressionist style of whichDaberlohn, no doubt, would have entirely approved.
That expressionist look of Salomon's portraits makes them now read asperiod pieces. And many of Salomon's suggestions for musicalaccompaniment (the play's imagined soundtrack) have since fallen intoobscurity--particularly, for an American viewer, the German folk songsand the popular ballads of Salomon's childhood. The current exhibitoffers an audio guide with snippets of the suggested tunes, and thishelps a modern audience hear what she had in mind, but it cannotrecapture the unmediated emotional tug that she intended. A stagedmusical based on Life? or Theater? opened this February in Philadelphia, but it is necessarily a transformation, not a restoration. There may, in fact, be no way to restore Salomon's work to its original power. What's surprising, however, is how much of it still feels fresh--indeed, subtle.
Just by setting Daberlohn's lofty vision of death as inspirationagainst the painful and mundane details of the deaths in Charlotte'sfamily, Salomon ends up revealing a great deal about both. We see thatthe desperation running through Charlotte's maternal line leads neitherto the canvas nor to the stage, but out the window. Yet we see, too,that it unmistakably inspires Charlotte's own art. And so the characterCharlotte transcends her family heritage--and the artist Salomontranscends her expressionist niche--by facing these contradictions andrefusing the comforting illusions that are offered to her. In Life?or Theater? the letter that Charlotte's mother once promised to send from heaven never arrives. For a few days after her mother's funeral, the nine-year-old waits for it to be delivered. But finally we see the child perched on the edge of a bathtub, the least romantic of places, sighing, "So, that's what they call life." The full opus could as well have been titled "So, that's what they call death."
Since Salomon herself was deported to Auschwitz (where she died atthe age of 26) shortly after this work was completed, Life? orTheater? is often presented, or pigeonholed, as a Holocaust memoir. But it actually says remarkably little about that gathering storm. In one panel, we see Hitler's goose-stepping troops as a sea of mustard uniforms and brush mustaches; in another, the frenzy of Kristallnacht. We see Charlotte's Jewish father lose his university post and then get sent to a labor camp (from which the resourceful Paulinka is able to rescue him), while Charlotte herself as a young woman is exiled to her grandparents' home in France. But for the most part, we receive information about the rise of the Nazis in the form of newspaper and radio reports--in words, that is, not images--which may seem more reliable, but which also suggest the failure of Salomon's characters to absorb emotionally what was happening.
With hindsight, we cannot help but be appalled at Daberlohn'signorant embrace of suffering just as the world was descending intohorror. But more lasting in its impact is Salomon's response tohim--nuanced even in the midst of unfolding events. Like a giddy displayof the possibilities of the art form she is inventing, her tinymultiplying Charlottes cavort across the page with a life that defiessterile theory; her fantastic characters are cartoonish yet so finelyobserved that their relationships with one another and the world seem toevolve of their own accord; her filmlike perspectives, as when she zoomsin from an "establishing shot" to a close-up, create both the illusionof movement and the awareness that the movement is illusion; even hercolors carry a full emotional weight, disintegrating into brownishstreaks of finger paint when Charlotte herself comes near todisintegration.
Still, Salomon has named her heroine Charlotte Kann, and over thecourse of these panels, what we learn is that it's true: In the face ofeverything, this Charlotte can, and she does. The last image in Life?or Theater? is of the artist turned toward the sea, canvas on lap, brush in hand. She is about to paint. Maybe she is about to paint the epic coming-of-age tale that we have just seen. On her back is the question, printed in blue and red, "Life? or Theater?" It's still unanswered, but we've just seen how much can be revealed in the asking.
