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In Life?, Salomon catalogues her family before her, her birth and youth, the world beyond her, the worlds inside her. Melody: “Weary am I of my days – wherefore all this pain, this pleasure… Sweet pea, come, ohĬome into my great… At last there approaches – where I shall wait for you, O my beloved.” Her narrative moves from vignette to memory, moves along emotional lines or aesthetic connections, a network of ideation and yearning.
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Her figure work ranges from rough forms to abstraction. Salomon’s combination of outline art and color fills do not often resemble the coloring inside the lines precision of traditional comics. “I am convinced you will not doubt for a moment that I have known and learned to love life in the meantime.” Rather than panels sharply distinguished across a page, her figures and temporal shifts glide between and over one another.
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It moves and sings itself across the tableau. Something I think bothers some, who would call her great work, not real comics, is that the text is, itself, unashamedly a visual component. Salomon most likely murdered her elderly, abusive grandfather, after generations had suffered his cruelty and rape, and she may have sketched him as he died.
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The Taschen edition is long, but much briefer than Salomon’s planned edition, which was just under 800 pages, and those pages were culled from over two thousand paintings she executed before 1943. Still, the potency of the images, the vibrancy and thoughtfulness of the text, and the vigilance of the translation make the edition worth reading, rewarding and life-changing despite its reproduction choices. Without scanning in this six hundred page edition, then carefully combining images, it is impossible, from the printed edition, to read the comic, then, as it was seemingly meant to be taken in. The translation is committed to blank space beside or opposite images, instead of over them, and the transparencies are frequently reproduced on their own, in their own space. The English-language edition, published by Taschen, has a careful, loving translation, full-color reproduction, but does not overlay the transparencies or provide transparencies to overlay onto the paintings of figures and scenes. “he had to vanish for a while from the human plane and make every sacrifice in order to create her world anew out of the depths.”Ĭharlotte Salomon was born in 1917, a few months before American comics genius, Jack Kirby, in Berlin, Germany.Ĭharlotte Salomon’s Leben? oder Theater? (translated into English, Life? or Theatre?) is over two-hundred and fifty pages of autobiography, memoir, family history, and dramatization framed as a musical, committed as a sequence of polyptych paintings with text overlays or embedded text, creating a massive achievement in comics which is only still being reckoned with for its depth, advancement of the art, significance as a historic document, beauty and intensity as an aesthetic creation, and power as a narrative artifact. By Travis Hedge Coke on JPatricia Highsmash