Charlotte Salomon was born in Berlin in 1917 of Jewish parents. The threat of the Nazis made her parents send her to Villefranche on the Côte d’Azur in 1933. There she decided to paint the story of her childhood and youth. She called her work a play or ‘Singspiel’. In the paintings we see for instance how, as Hitler rose to power, Charlotte fell in love with the Jewish singing teacher Daberlohn, who stimulated her to start painting. In 1943 Charlotte Salomon was murdered in Auschwitz at the age of 26.In order to reconstruct Charlotte’s life, Richard Dindo has made a selection from Charlotte’s autobiography comprising 767 paintings. He also included historical photo material and shots he had made himself on location in order to create a documentary context.Charlotte ‘vie ou théâtre?’ shows the approach which has characterised Dindo’s work since Die Erschiessung des Landesverraters Ernst S. (1975): a portrait in the form of an investigation into a dead person or someone not present. It is this ‘logic of memory’ which is the focus of his work.
