Charlotte Salomon: A Visual Testament - exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London, England

Born to this well-to-do Jewish family in Berlin in 1917, Salomon was an only child who grew up silent and reserved. Her reticence may have had something to do with the family tragedies that marked her childhood. When Salomon was eight, her mother committed suicide. Gloomy images record the bouts of depression and unsuccessful medical treatments leading up to Franziska's fatal leap from a window of their house in the Charlottenberg neighborhood. With the unflinching vision that characterizes her art, Salomon even paints her mother's contorted, bleeding body lying on the ground.

Following Franziska's death, the visual tone of Life or Theater? changes. While the images depicting Salomon's first eight years are rendered in a bright, charming style that would be wholly suitable for a children's book, the pages recording the suicide depict dim interiors and anguished figures. Salomon nearly obscures many of the scenes with dark washes, as in the desolate image of her eight-year-old self brooding alone in a bathroom. Gradually, however, the palette re-brightens as Charlotte's father and grandparents seek to console her with a trip to Venice and an active life which included tennis, horseback riding and excursions to the beach and countryside. The manic energy pervading these crowded scenes evokes a family seeking to distract itself from a deep sorrow.

In 1930, Albert Salomon remarried. His second wife was a successful classical singer named Paula Lindberg, who had performed under conductors such as Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter and Wilhelm Furtwangler. Paula, who is called Paulinka Bimbam in Life or Theater?, appears to have brought some much-needed warmth and loving to the repressed, undemonstrative Salomon family. In seeming gratitude, Charlotte devotes many pages to recounting her professional and emotional life in the years before she met Albert Salomon. The page devoted to Paula and Albert's wedding is a mosaic of different scenes. In upper center, we see the marriage being performed by a rabbi in Paulinka's hometown of Kurzenberg-on-the-Rhine. A Jewish cemetery and Lindberg's weeping mother flank the chuppa, or wedding canopy, under which the bride and groom stand. (These explicit signs of Jewishness are rare in the more or less assimilated world which Salomon depicts.) Below this, we see Charlotte, her grandparents and her governess celebrating the wedding--which they apparently did not attend--around a table in Berlin. Vignettes to left and right show Charlotte receiving and playing a recording of her new stepmother singing a tune from the opera Carmen (so the text tells us). The text also identifies a scene at the bottom of this crowded picture: a "famous" opera director (based on Kurt Singer, the director of the Berlin Municipal Opera) with whom Lindberg used to work is seen listening to a performance of Orpheus and Eurydice. In the lower right-hand corner, we see the newlyweds walking out of the picture, presumably to begin an Italian honeymoon, also mentioned in the text.