May Notes - 2025

may studio notes

May 27

**Charlotte Soloman,** *Life or Theater*

Resistance, Rebellion and Death - Making Art in Times of Repression

Great art, like great history, demands the full palette—even the colors we’d rather leave in the dark. — Victoria Finlay, art historian.

Recently, I started to take a memoir writing course with Marion Roach Smith. When Michael Marton , the German documentary filmmaker who I lived and worked with for eight years, died, I wanted to write something about our work together and I felt that Marion’s class would help me do that. Little did I know what black holes I would wander down in the process.

Michael and I made ten documentaries together. One of them was about Oscar Pinkus, the Holocaust survivor and author of the extraordinary account of his experiences in “The House of Ashes.” We traveled with him when he testified against one of his torturers. In preparing to write about this experience, I reread his book, and then also spent some time looking at other artists who were directly affected by the Nazis. Some, but not all, were resisters. Emil Nolde, famously was a supporter of the regime. He even mailed sample portfolios to Joseph Goebbels!

Many are familiar with the work of Kathe Kollwitz, who supported the downtrodden since the First World War; less well known are Felix Nussbaum and Charlotte Salomon. I have included blog posts about these artists below.

It is the work of Charlotte Salomon that blew me away. She fled Germany to stay with an American Heiress in the south of France. Feeling as though she were in a race against death, she completed 700 gouache paintings on paper, which illustrated her entire life. It is considered the first graphic novel. She was influenced by the German Expressionists and her work is fresh, exciting, and breathless. It is rarely shown outside of the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam. Her story is as compelling as her work and it has been depicted in an animated film “Charlotte,” which I have included below. For me, the discovery of her work was truly exciting.

But the quote, “Great art, like great history, demands the full palette—even the colors we’d rather leave in the dark,” was probably never more true than with Nolde and Salomon.

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In this carousel, are works by Kollwitz, Nolde, Nussbaum and Salomon.

HISTORY SPOTLIGHT: PAUL KLEE

In 1933 the new Nazi regime dismissed Paul Klee from his Düsseldorf professorship and branded his poetic abstractions “degenerate.” During the ensuing purge more than a hundred of his works—most sources give the figure as 102—were seized from German museums; seventeen were paraded in Munich’s 1937 Entartete Kunst exhibition, hung askew beneath jeering slogans to exemplify cultural decay. Klee had already fled to Bern, but the public shaming severed his professional ties to Germany, slashed his income, and deepened the stress of an autoimmune illness that would claim his life in 1940. Ironically, the Nazis’ attempt to vilify his art only amplified his international reputation, turning those confiscated canvases into enduring symbols of modernism’s resilience.

FROM THE LIBRARY : OSCAR PINKUS, THE HOUSE OF ASHES

Oscar Pinkus describes how entire Jewish communities were wiped out in Losice (his home town), Biala, Siedice and Miedzyrnec. He portrays the harrowing consequences of Jewish isolation amid anti-Semitic populations. One important aspect of this book is its revelations concerning the Polish underground, Armja Krajowa, who, after the Nazis had been driven out, continued to commit anti-Semitic actions and succeeded in murdering three of the 20 survivors of Losice.

AT THE MOVIES: CHARLOTTE

“The true story of Charlotte Salomon, a young German-Jewish artist who comes of age on the eve of the Second World War and defies incredible odds to create a timeless masterpiece.”

This animated film is not for children. It is a serious representation of Charlotte Salomon’s life, which contains all the darkness and complications of the period, and reminds us not to judge artists (or anyone) by their darkest moments.