Self-portrait of the artist at work

It turns out that Art Spiegelman’s factually-based graphic novel, Maus, was not the first use of a comic book format relating to the Holocaust. Life? or Theatre? A Play with Music by Charlotte Salomon, a German-Jewish refugee who perished in Auschwitz at the age of 25, consisted of a remarkable series of 1300 vividly colorful frames (known technically as “gouches”). These were based on her life and that of her family, and completed in the year prior to her being arrested by the Gestapo in the south of France in September 1943.

These generally include text (mostly in German, some in French), either as explanatory captions or embedded within the paintings themselves. Salomon advances her tale as well through suggesting that it be staged as an opera, indicating lyrics and tunes. This conceit is perhaps inspired by her step-mother, who was in fact an opera singer, Paula Lindberg (née Paula Levy, a secular Jew, like Charlotte and her physician father, Albert).

Salomon’s work features two love stories, probably unrequited and perhaps fictionalized. One is the Charlotte character’s infatuation with Paula Lindberg’s voice coach, and the other is this same man’s (imagined?) longing for Ms. Lindberg.

What adds poignancy is that her art was a personal triumph over clinical depression, which apparently plagued the women on her mother’s side of the family. Her mother committed suicide during Charlotte’s early childhood in the 1920s, as did other female relatives, including later, her grandmother. In 1939, having joined her grandparents in France, in exile from Nazi Germany, Salomon heeds the advice of her physician that she save herself through her art, by telling her story. It is in a frenzy of creativity that she apparently succeeds, only to fall victim to the Nazis.

Charlotte at 10, with her father

She married an Austrian-Jewish refugee, also in hiding, shortly before their arrest. Four months pregnant upon their arrival at Auschwitz, she was immediately gassed. Her husband perished there several months later.

But her art survived in the safe-keeping of her French doctor; “C’est toute ma vie” (it’s my entire life) she told him, words that proved tragically prophetic. After the war, he passed it on to an American woman who had befriended Charlotte and her grandparents early in the war, before returning to America. She in turn gave it to Charlotte’s father and step-mother, who survived the war in hiding in the Netherlands where they continued to live (Dr. Salomon died in 1976 in his early 90s, while her step-mother passed away at 102 in 2000). Charlotte’s art has resided since 1971 at the Jewish Museum of Amsterdam, when not on loan to other institutions.

When visiting the Bay Area in April, I saw an exhibit of about 300 frames of Life? or Theatre? at San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum, where it is currently on view until July 31. I was set to pitch the story to The Forward’s “Arty Semite” Blog, when I saw that it was featured there that very day. One can view a slide show of the exhibit at that site.