Charlotte Salomon

Life? or Theatre?
This is the cathartic masterpiece of Charlotte Salomon. Entrusted to a friend before her deportation to Auschwitz, her gouache series lives on as an artistic feat beyond category or comparison.This edition brings together the most important works in an autobiographical worka shattering document of self-expression born from family tragedy.

When German artist Charlotte Salomon (19171943) handed her gouache series Life? or Theater? over to a friend, she beseeched him to take good care of it, it is my entire life. A few months later, the five-months pregnant Charlotte was picked up by a Gestapo truck, deported to Drancy, and then on to Auschwitz, where she died upon arrival at the age 26.

The work Salomon left behind is, in a very real sense, her pice de rsistance in her own words, something wildly eccentric. A cycle of nearly 1,300 autobiographical gouaches, it combines creative force with pioneering personal