Reading Charlotte Salomon

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. ix, 233 pages, [12] pages of plates, illustrations (some colour); 27 cm. Firm binding, clean inside copy. Dust jacket protected in a mylar cover. A fine copy of the first printing. OVERSIZE! No priority/international, except by arrangement. "Charlotte Salomon was born in Berlin in 1917 and was murdered at Auschwitz at the age of twenty-six. While in exile in the south of France from 1940 until her deportation in 1943, she created some 1,325 small gouaches using only the three primary colors plus white. From these she gathered nearly 800 into a work that she titled Life? or Theater? A Play with Music, which employs images, texts, and musical and cinematic references. The narrative, informed by Salomon's experiences as a talented, cultured, and assimilated German Jew, depicts a life lived in the shadow of Nazi persecution and a family history of suicide, but also reveals moments of intense happiness and hope. The tone of the gouaches becomes increasingly raw and urgent as Salomon is further enmeshed in grim personal as well as political events. The result is a deeply moving meditation on life, art, and death on the eve of the Holocaust."- Publisher. CONTENTS: Reading Charlotte Salomon: history, memory, modernism, by Michael P. Steinberg; A life before Auschwitz, by Monica Bohm-Duchen; Theater of memory: trauma and cure in Charlotte Salomon's modernist fariytale, by Griselda Pollock; Historical effacements: facing Charlotte Salomon, by Darcy Buerkle; Memory and Trauerspiel: Charlotte Salomon's Life? or theater? and the angel of history, by Christine Conley; Creative synergies: Charlotte Salomon and Alfred Wolfsohn, by Edward Timms; Giving voice: Charlotte Salomon and Charlotte Delbo, by Ernst van Alphen; Ornament, boundaries, and mourning after Auschwitz, by Shelley Hornstein; Inscriptions of difference in Charlotte Salomon's work, by Astrid Schmetterling; The aesthetics of trauma: five installations of Charlotte Salomon' s Life? or theater?, by Reesa Greenberg; Aestheticizing catastrophe, by Mieke Bal; "Create her world anew": seven dilemmas in re-presenting Charlotte Salomon, by Mary Felstiner; On the impossibility of Charlotte Salomon in the classroom, by Nanette Salomon.. 1st. Hardcover. Fine/Fine. 4to. Collectible.