86: With dream-awakened eyes
Hello, I hope you’re well.
Welcome to Border Crossing issue #86.
Thank you very much for continuing to read this beast and support my writing. It means a lot, you honestly keep me going. I appreciate you. Also, a very warm welcome, if you’re a new sign-up. Thank you so much.
This issue, I wrote about the great under-appreciated artist Charlotte Salomon. It’s a long essay and her story is exceptionally dark, so I’ll understand if you skip it. There’s a good omelette in it, though.
I hope you’re having a gorgeous brat summer and if you’re in England, you haven’t had to encounter any racist thugs. If you’re in Brighton, hopefully you’ve had a very happy Pride weekend. As I was writing this yesterday, it was absolute joyful carnage outside. I finished the long-read as Girls Aloud sang ‘Call The Shots’, echoing across the rooftops from Preston Park.
how’s your creative life?
Are you someone whose life is very creatively driven (professional, semi-pro or amateur) but you’re a bit stuck, and could you use a critical listening ear — a structured ongoing conversation — to support your creative life?
For the past eighteen months I’ve worked with several friends (on a convivial, non-transactional basis — well, they buy the coffees) as a sort of ‘creativity counsellor’. I’m enjoying it a lot and the feedback is magic.
Now I’d like to offer this to five more people for beta-testing, to see if it’s viable. It won’t be free, but for those five people, I’ll charge a super-low amount, with a ‘Pay What You Can’ option, running for a five month period, from September to January. If it goes well enough, I’ll launch it professionally next year.
So are you interested? Could this be useful for you?
Email me — chris@christt.com — for a chat and I’ll send details of how it works, what it involves.
gems
1
Stevie Chick’s profile for The Guardian of David Remfry, the Hull-born painter who was long-standing ‘artist in residence’ at the Chelsea Hotel.
2
One of my favourite investigative writers, Evan Ratliff, has launched an offbeat new audio series, Shell Game (Apple podcast link). For season one, Evan mostly messes about with AI voices and clones himself.
3
The author and music historian Mike Barnes wrote perhaps the definitive history of prog, A New Day Yesterday. It’s a huge book. In this article for Omnibus Press, Mike shares some things he learnt from such a major writing challenge.
4
Lauren Crosby Mendlicott’s energetic approach to freelance writing pitches is admirable and daunting. Here’s her Twitter thread about it. I can’t imagine being arsed with this level of effort. She’s smashing it.
potato gems
I missed this piece from last month in Wired (the American edition) about the state of the USA’s consumption of potatoes.
Also, in a rare BBC News potato-themed economy piece, Nina Warhurst and Lynette Horsburgh raise concerns about people unable to afford chippy tea. Essentially it’s another angle on the many potato price rise stories doing the rounds this summer.
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With dream-awakened eyes
(trigger warning: suicide, sexual abuse, Nazi holocaust, just about everything)
She’s a painter whose work I’ve never seen in real life, but who I think about often. Not a household name — a cult figure — but admired and taken seriously by art people. Earlier this year, she briefly showed up in Lyndsey Stonebridge’s excellent book on Hannah Arendt, We Are Free To Change The World, which set me thinking about her. Anti-immigrant rhetoric and violence make me think about artists in exile, artists under threat, and these past few days took me back to my notes on Charlotte Salomon.
Charlotte Salomon was born in 1917 in Berlin. She was German and Jewish, so you know how this will end.
Salomon’s paintings are these chunky, splodgy, vivid, brutal things. They often include scrawled text layered into the art, and through a 2024 lens there’s a glorious up-to-date sense of counterculture about them, of comic strip and zine design, while at the same time she is firmly, consciously utilising (and subverting) the painting language and form of her own terrifying era. Salomon is a visceral sloganeer and cartoonist, and at the same time a serious, visionary painter. She’s a world builder: one of those artists who create one, vast master-work that contains many individual pieces. Like Proust, or Blake, or the Marvel Cinematic Universe. She layers magic realism over her own pain in a way that reminds me of Frida Kahlo, though I’m sure art experts would laugh at the comparison.
Charlotte Salomon’s epic thing is called Leben? oder Theater?: Ein Singespiel and despite being essentially created while on the run, as a stateless refugee within Europe, in horrendous circumstances, it survives and comprises more than 700 goauche paintings, making one coherent whole. It is an astonishing, rarely seen work. As the title implies — in English, Life? Or Theatre? A Song-play — one tricky aspect of digging into Salomon’s story is that her art was a complicated, confusing tangling of reality and fantasy. This makes it more difficult to unravel her real life. We must believe her, though.
So.
Charlotte’s father Albert Salomon was a surgeon who specialised in boobs. He’s one of the great pioneers of mammography. They were fairly well-off but when Charlotte was eight years old, her mother Fran took her own life. Little Charlotte grew up believing she’d died from flu.
Charlotte was a teenager when Albert married again: Paula was a notable opera singer who made their home an iconic hub for parties, hosting a rich variety of people, including public figures. Einstein was a guest, and the theologian Albert Schweiter. The house filled with music, conversation, lots of Alberts, and Charlotte got close to her step-mum. This period is likely her happiest time. She fell in love (I’ll come back to that) and discovered art. In particular, an idyllic summer trip to Italy triggered an obsession with painting that would last her whole life.
In 1936, at nineteen, Charlotte manages to get into the top German school for Pure and Applied Arts, in Berlin. This is a rare feat: as the far-right gained power in Germany through the 1930s, especially once Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, German universities imposed a strict limit on Jewish students. Maximum 1.5% of a university’s student body could be Jewish, and a requirement for entry was that their fathers had fought on the front-lines in the Great War. So it’s likely that Salomon is being recognised as a significant talent, or she couldn’t’ve got in. She studies painting and wins a prize for her work, but after her second year there, it’s becoming too dangerous to risk going back.
Life for Jewish people, and others in Germany, is inexorably descending towards horror. Racist violence is on the streets. The country’s leaders stoke divisions with oppressive, bigoted lawmaking, as well as dehumanising rhetoric. As always, as everywhere, people in fear are too easily led into hatred.
After Kristallnacht, in November 1938, Albert Salomon is briefly imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, then freed. By now, the scary atmosphere and disempowerment and day-to-day oppression are becoming profound for Jewish people. Travel and financial restrictions are a big part of that. By the way, if you haven’t thought about it for a while, and if you can bear to, look up what Kristallnacht was like to experience, and how it unfolded. Compare it to how people are behaving in different places around the world, now, including here, literally last night, in Great Britain. It’s worth juxtaposing: combining the big picture’s historic shape, an economic direction of travel, and the close-focused detail of how people behave towards each-other, face to face. So deeply unsettling. You didn’t need me to write that, though: it’s also obvious.
The Salomon family agrees they must leave Germany. First (I think while Albert is still imprisoned) they send Charlotte to stay with her grandparents (that is, her late mother’s parents) in the South of France. Once he’s released, Albert and Paula plan to leave via the Netherlands. Charlotte won’t see them again.
Not far from Nice, the wealthy German-American meat heiress Ottilie Moore is living in a chateau, in Villefranche-sur-Mer. She’s the daughter of iconic Sausage King, Adolph Goebels (no relation to famous Nazis, despite his rather Nazi-ish name). Moore puts her sausage money to wonderful use and will become known after the war, as part of the ‘kindertransport’, providing safe haven for a number of escaping Jewish children and families. There’s an offbeat documentary film made by Moore’s great-niece Dana Plays (who made more than fifty films, is still alive and teaches on cinema in San Francisco, I think) about her life, The Story of Ottilie Moore, with Ernest Hemingway as one of the ‘talking heads’ in it, coming off a bit like he’s on Channel 5 talking about music in the eighties.
Anyway, in 1938, Moore is already hosting Charlotte Salomon’s grandparents, who live in a cottage in the gardens. After a while living with Moore, who loved Charlotte’s painting and greatly encouraged her art, the granddaughter and grandparents move into an apartment in Nice. This is a disaster.
Soon after the move, Salomon’s grandmother tries to hang herself in the bathroom. She survives, however this is when her grandfather reveals to Charlotte that her mother didn’t die from flu, but killed herself. Not just her mother: something runs deep through Charlotte’s family on her mum’s side. Her mother’s sister also took her own life. Both sisters. Her great-grandmother, great uncle, second cousin, all killed themselves, he says.
The war begins. France falls. After one or two more failed attempts, including with stockpiled pills, Salomon’s grandmother succeeds in killing herself, jumping from a window. Charlotte is now alone with her grandfather. Soon, the French authorities capture the pair and imprison them in a rough internment camp in the Pyrenees, ahead of the arrival of the Nazi infrastructure.
During their time together, Charlotte Salomon’s grandfather constantly demands to share a bed, and repeatedly sexually abuses her, attempting to force himself on Charlotte. I don’t know if it begins after his wife dies, or was going on the whole time. He is elderly and infirm enough that they are released from the camp. Now they are hiding together, a pair of refugees, yet she is also the repeated focus of this man’s desire to control and attempt rape. At which point, Charlotte escapes him: he goes back to Nice, while she returns to Villefranche and has a breakdown at the villa. She has been devastated both by her grandfather and by the revelation of her family’s history of suicide, let alone what’s happening in the world.
This is conjecture on my part but: all the women in this man’s immediate family, his wife, both his daughters, took their own lives, and he was his granddaughter’s abuser. Surely there’s no way he only abused Charlotte. He may have framed it to her as something innately wrong with her family line, but really, he, himself, is the likely reason for these women being unable to cope with life, in an already impossible time.
Away from him, Charlotte is treated by local doctor George Moridis, who counsels her to paint as therapy, and becomes a trusted friend. Beginning to recover, Salomon rents a room in nearby Saint Jean Cap Ferrat and this is when she begins to paint Leben? oder Theater?
From 1941 to 1943, now in her mid twenties, Salomon makes over 1,000 fictionalised autobiographical gouache paintings in less than two years, re-posing Hamlet’s great question, to be or not to be. Should she take her own life, or try to achieve something grand, unpredictable and different? She defines this piece as a ‘gesamptkunstwerk’ (a ‘total work of art’) after Wagner, which explains the inclusion of written words within the painted images. The whole is structured as the three sections of an opera. Of the individual paintings, 769 pieces (says Wikipedia, or 764 according to Katy Hessel’s book and Yale University Press) will become the final work Leben? oder Theater?
There is something of Proust’s behemoth À la recherche du temps perdu, both in Salomon’s sprawling scale and in her blurry fictionalising of detail, in order to confront her life. Where Proust disguises queer love as hetero-conventional passion, Salomon disguises the darkness she sees in her family with altered details and names, often cute puns. She calls her beloved step-mum ‘Paulinka Bimbam’. What a fabulous name.
It has another quirk I love, which is that, like Richard Osman’s House Of Games for example, it’s a work of art whose closing words are also its title. The final thing she does is pose that question, life? or theatre?
What her grandfather did is in the work. What her mother did is in the work.
Moreover, also like Proust (though unlike Blake, for example) there is a great obsessive romantic love at the heart of Leben? oder Theater? Back in Berlin she’d had a passionate affair with a voice coach friend of her step-mum, Alfred Wolfsohn. In Leben? oder Theater? he’s renamed ‘Amadeus Daberlohn’ and is portrayed as the first person to take her seriously as an adult artist.
I know this is already a long piece but Wolfsohn is worth a side-note. He was a stretcher bearer on the western front in the Great War and afterwards suffered from severe PTSD, with lasting symptoms of auditory hallucination. He would hear the persistent noise of screaming, dying soldiers, for lengthy periods of time, which no psychiatric or hospital treatment of the day was able to fix. Through the following years, Wolfsohn managed to cure himself, by making extreme vocal noises. Essentially, he screamed himself well again. Wolfsohn began teaching tools to extend vocal range. Intended as a therapeutic tool, actually his pioneering techniques transferred to avant-garde theatre and music performance. Anyway, somewhere along the way he also became the great first love of Charlotte Salomon’s life and her romantic muse. He would survive into the early 1960s.
Back to 1942. At some point Salomon is forced to leave the seclusion of her little apartment, and go back to live in Nice with her loathed — by now very frail — grandfather. Her residence permit, a fragile piece of paper keeping her from arrest, is based on being his carer, so she must be there.
One day, Charlotte makes him a poisoned omelette and kills him.
Fair play.
She gets away with it, unsuspected, but with his death, her papers are now worthless, so her status and ability to stay in the area are at very high risk. Salomon marries her boyfriend Alex Nagler, another German Jewish refugee, and falls pregnant. But they must escape. This is the moment at which the Nazis majorly ramp up searching for Jewish people and others in hiding, across southern France. Prior to that, to an extent they’d left it to locals, which obviously brought patchy results. There are countless tales of people whose escape got them this far, but who now urgently needed to get overseas. It is terror. It is trusting people-traffickers, or tenuous paperwork. It is expensive. It is Casablanca. Preparing to flee again, trying to figure out how and where to go next, Salomon leaves the entirety of her completed masterwork Leben? oder Theater? — all 764 paintings — in the care of Doctor Moridis, addressing the work to Ottilie Moore.
‘Keep this safe,’ she says, ‘it is my whole life.’
She writes a long letter to her old love Alfred Wolfsohn, about her grandfather’s abuse, confessing to killing him.
Charlotte also channels Wolfsohn’s thinking, conversations from years before, to conclude her masterpiece. Frantically she layers text onto paint —
With dream-awakened eyes she saw the beauty around her, saw the sea, felt the sun, and knew she had to vanish for a while from the human surface and make every sacrifice, to create her world anew, out of the depths.
In September, before they can leave, Charlotte and Alex are discovered in a house in Nice, dragged out, and put on a train to a ‘processing centre’ in Drancy, near Paris. The Nazis have them.
They are separated. On Thursday 7th October, Charlotte, five months pregnant, is put onto a transport to Auschwitz. She arrives after three days onboard the train, on Sunday 10th, is put into a gas chamber and killed with her unborn child, that same day.
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Ottilie Moore won’t receive Leben? oder Theater? until two years after the war has finished, when she returns to France. Later she will pass on the huge package to surviving members of Salomon’s family.
Alfred will never read Charlotte’s letter, but it survives. Only as recently as 2015 it was controversially made public. The truth of it has been questioned, as Salomon blurred reality with fiction so intricately in her work.
But it is the truth.
In 1939, after seeing off his daughter to France, Charlotte’s father Albert Salomon flees to the Netherlands. He gets caught and sent to the Westerbok transit camp in Drente, where he remains a prisoner for years. But in 1943 he escapes and goes into hiding, somewhere in Holland. He’s never caught. He survives in hiding until the war ends, and then moves to Amsterdam, where he re-enters academic life.
Leben? oder Theater? had its first exhibition in the 1960s. In 1971 it was passed into the care of the Joods Historisch Museum, Amsterdam, which I have repeatedly not bothered to visit. I won’t make that omission again. In 1981 they displayed 250 of the pieces. Then in 1998 there was an exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. I was living in London by then (and dating an art critic) but I had no clue of Charlotte Salomon’s existence.
It took less than twelve years from Hitler taking power to the infrastructure existing that enabled Charlotte’s industrialised murder in a gas chamber.
I’m old enough that I’ve met people who carried stretchers across the front-lines of the Great War. I’ve met another artist whose work Hitler declared ‘degenerate’ and who escaped from Germany to Britain.
The care with which Leben? oder Theater? has been kept together is brilliant for the work and admirable. But it does mean very few Salomon pieces are floating around the international art scene, which in turn has probably prevented her from becoming better known.
I cannot think of another artist whose work I haven’t seen, that I long to see more. In this era of Hilma af Klint, of giving important women artists long overdue exposure, and also in this era of dehumanising rhetoric and populist fearmongering leading to racist mob violence, let’s take Charlotte Salomon to the great rooms, complete, and let the world know her.
get in touch
email: chris@christt.com
Instagram: @cjthorpetracey
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Listen to Refigure podcast, just search “refigure” where you get podcasts. In episode #76, we watched the Brian Eno documentary Eno, which re-edits itself for every screening. Rifa went to an LGBTQI+ Late event at the Wallace Collection in central London and I saw Black Country, New Road’s benefit show for Gaza at Brighton Concorde 2.
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All my love,
Christopher
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