- She is primarily remembered as the creator of an autobiographical series of paintings Leben? oder Theater?: Ein Singspiel (Life? or Theater?: A Song-play), the largest known artwork made by a Jewish person who died in the Holocaust, consisting of 769 individual works painted between 1941 and 1943 in the south of France, while Salomon was in hiding from the Nazis.
- She was the stepdaughter of the opera singer Paula Salomon-Lindberg.
- Charlotte Salomon came from a prosperous Berlin family. Her father, Albert Salomon was a surgeon; her mother, Franziska (Grünwald), sensitive and troubled, committed suicide when Charlotte was eight or nine, though she was led to believe her mother died from influenza.
- Salomon experienced a nervous breakdown that stemmed from her grandfather's revelations and her disgust for him. The local doctor, Dr. George Morridis, advised her to paint.
- In February 2015, the Musiktheater im Revier (MiR) in Gelsenkirchen presented a ballet-opera by Michelle DiBucci based on life and work of the artist. Its title was Charlotte Salomon: Der Tod und die Malerin ("Death and the Painter"); it was choreographed and directed by Bridget Breiner. Again the autobiographical work Life? or Theater? formed the basis for the dramatization. DiBucci was originally commissioned to compose an opera on the life and work of Salomon by director Marie Zimmermann [de] for the 2010 Ruhrtriennale. The work was not completed due to the death of Zimmermann in 2007. Several years later, DiBucci was approached by choreographer Bridget Breiner and asked to adapt the work into a full-length ballet. Charlotte Salomon: Der Tod und die Malerin was the winner of a 2015 Der Faust, Germany's highest honor in theatre. Bridget Breiner received the award for Best Choreography.
- Salomon rented a room in the pension La Belle Aurore in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, and there she commenced the work that would outlive her. She began her series of 769 paintings - entitled Life? or Theater? - by stating that she was driven by "the question: whether to take her own life or undertake something wildly unusual". In the space of two years, she painted more than one thousand gouaches. She edited the paintings, re-arranged them, and added texts, captions, and overlays. She had a habit of humming songs to herself while painting. The entire work was a slightly fantastic autobiography preserving the main events of her life - her mother's death, studying art in the shadow of the Third Reich, her relationship with her grandparents - but altering the names and employing a strong element of fantasy. She also added notes about appropriate music to increase the dramatic effect, and she called Life? or Theater? a "Singespiel", or lyrical drama.
- In 1981, Dutch director Frans Weisz released a feature film based on her life, entitled Charlotte, with the Austrian actress Birgit Doll playing the artist and Daberlohn played by Derek Jacobi. In 2011 he made a documentary revealing the contents of her last letter to Wolfsohn.
- There have been several other exhibitions of parts of Life? or Theater?, and a number of films and plays made about Charlotte Salomon's life, notably Company of Angels (2002) by the UK theatre company Horse and Bamboo Theatre which toured the UK, Netherlands and U.S.
- Since 1992 a primary school in Berlin bears the name of the artist.
- At a time when German universities were restricting their Jewish student quota to 1.5% of the student body (providing their fathers had served on the front line in the First World War), Salomon succeeded in gaining admission to the Vereinigte Staatsschulen für freie und angewandte Kunst (United State Schools for Pure and Applied Arts) in 1936. She studied painting there for two years, but by summer 1938 the antisemitic policy of Hitler's Third Reich meant that it was too dangerous for her to continue attending the college and she did not return, despite winning a prize.
- An animated movie called Charlotte, based on Salomon's life and paintings, was released in 2021.[48] It was initially set to be directed by Bibo Bergeron with a 10 million euro budget,[49] but Bergeron left the film in October 2019. Eric Warin, co-director of Ballerina, and Tahir Rana, director of Welcome to the Wayne, co-directed the film, which features the voice acting of Keira Knightley as Salomon in the English version, and Marion Cotillard in the French version. The film had its world premiere at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival on September 13, 2021.
- Shortly after the outbreak of war in September 1939, Charlotte's grandmother succeeded in taking her own life. Her grandmother had stockpiled Veronal and morphine for when the German army arrived, but when she was denied access to her medication, she instead tried and failed to hang herself before eventually succeeding by throwing herself out of a window.
- A novel, Charlotte, written by David Foenkinos, was published in 2014, which won the prestigious French literary prize Le prix Théophraste Renaudot, among other prizes.
- By September 1943, Salomon had married another German Jewish refugee, Alexander Nagler. The two of them were dragged from their house and transported by rail from Nice to the Nazi "processing centre" at Drancy near Paris. By now, Salomon was five months pregnant. She was transported to Auschwitz on 7 October 1943 and was probably murdered in the gas chamber on the same day that she arrived there, October 10.
- Charlotte and her grandfather were interned by the French authorities in a bleak camp in the Pyrenees called Gurs. Charlotte recalls in Life? or Theater? that spending a night in a crowded train is preferable to spending one night with her grandfather: "I'd rather have ten more nights like this than a single one alone with him." His constant request to share his bed with her and her own words in a confession letter of 35 pages, made public in 2015, suggest sexual abuse.
- In 2015, a 35-page confession by Salomon to the fatal poisoning of her grandfather, kept secret for decades, was released by a Parisian publisher.
- Charlotte was sixteen when the Nazis came to power in 1933. She simply refused to go to school, and stayed at home.
- In 1942, Salomon, whose residence permit depended upon her caretaking of her grandfather, joined her grandfather in Nice. Soon after, she poisoned him with a homemade veronal omelette. The event is detailed in a 35-page illustrated confessional letter Salomon addressed to her former lover Alfred Wolfsohn, who never received the letter.
- Charlotte Salomon was a German-Jewish artist born in Berlin.
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