A Jewish artist who was 25 years old and five months pregnant when she was sent to Auschwitz is finally being hailed by Germany as one of its great modern painters, more than 60 years after her death.
Charlotte Salomon, who is believed
A Jewish artist who was 25 years old and five months pregnant when she was sent to Auschwitz is finally being hailed by Germany as one of its great modern painters, more than 60 years after her death.
Charlotte Salomon, who is believed to have been dispatched to the gas chambers on arrival at the Nazi death camp in 1943, spent her last two years in hiding, completing 1,325 pocketbook-sized gouache paintings which told the turbulent story of her life.
Her pictures, discovered after the war in an attic in the south of France, were dismissed for decades in her own country - horrified by her fate - as of little artistic merit and German critics were able to brush her work aside. In recent years, however, her pictures have won growing acclaim abroad and Germany has now been forced to acknowledge the artistic as well as the historical significance of Salomon's work, which critics are comparing to that of the greatest expressionist artists.
More than 800 pictures from her striking pictorial autobiography Life? Or Theatre? have gone on show at Frankfurt's Stadel museum, the first comprehensive exhibition of her art in Germany.
The exhibition has forced the German art world to rethink its attitude to a woman whose paintings were once seen as merely the visual equivalent of the diary of Anne Frank, but are now being compared to the work of Marc Chagall, Edward Munch and Max Beckmann - and to acknowledge the force of her striking images of life under the Nazis. "The aesthetic quality of these paintings has never been adequately acknowledged in Germany; they are in fact a key work of the 20th century," wrote Ulrike Knofel, an art critic, in Der Spiegel magazine last week.
Sabine Schulze, the curator of the museum, said that the paintings raised feelings of guilt among Germans who see them.
For many years, she said, they were regarded merely as a record of life under the Nazis by one of the victims of the regime, rather than as significant works of art in their own right.
"Charlotte Salomon has not received widespread attention in Germany until now because her work had always been associated with the crimes of the Nazi era," she said. "This comprehensive exhibition pays tribute to her role as an artist for the first time."
The collection, which belongs to the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam, portrays Germany's now almost extinct Jewish upper middle class during the Nazi era and the story of the artist's complicated personal relationships and the tragedies that befell her.
Salomon was born in 1917, the only daughter of a wealthy Jewish surgeon, and was brought up in the family's large flat in the middle-class Charlottenburg district of Berlin, where she went to school.
Personal tragedy struck early when her mother, Franziska, committed suicide by jumping out of a fourth-floor window. Although Salomon, then eight, was not told the cause of her mother's death for another 13 years, it burdened her for the rest of her life.
Her father married again, this time to the leading Berlin opera singer, Paula Lindberg. When Charlotte was 15 the Nazis came to power - an event which she vividly captured in a gouache which depicts a Berlin street overflowing with Hitler's brownshirts, marching under a great red, white and black Nazi swastika banner.
For the Salomon family, the consequences were devastating. The paintings show how Charlotte faced anti-Semitic hostility at school, while her family was forced to adjust to the new regime. Her father was confined to working in a Jewish hospital and her stepmother was forbidden to perform in public.
Bec