Charlotte Salomon: “life? Or Theater?”

In the early years of World War II, Charlotte Salomon–a 23-year-old Jewish artist from Berlin–fled to the South of France where she shut herself in a hotel room and spent two years feverishly painting the history of her life. She called it Life? or Theater?: A Play with Music; an astounding body of over 1,300 powerfully drawn and expressively colored gouache paintings conceived as an operetta on paper.

This exhibition of nearly 300 paintings from Life? orTheater?offered a rare, firsthand opportunity to witness this amazing masterpiece.