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Candida Cave outside New End Theatre |
Breathing new life into an inspiring spirit
Simon Wroe on the story of a Jewish girl who crammed a lifetime’s creativity into her short life that ended in Auschwitz
FEW people know the story of Charlotte Saloman. None of her art work has ever been on the open market; she died at just 26. Yet her story is one worth telling.
Born in 1917 to a cultured Jewish family in Berlin, her late adolescence was spent in hiding, the shadow of Nazism ever present. In that respect – and the remarkable body of work, much highly personal, she produced in that time – Charlotte’s life bears a close resemblance to that of Anne Frank.
But there, according to art historian and playwright Candida Cave, the comparisons should end.
Ms Cave, from Glenloch Road, Belsize Park, believes the wit, insight and tortured honesty of Charlotte’s work has retained a power all of its own. Lotte’s Journey, her new play about the artist’s extraordinary life, opens this week at the New End Theatre in Hampstead.
“Very few people know about her and yet she painted over 1,300 pieces in less than two years,” Candida explains. “It’s extraordinary and totally different from Anne Frank. In Anne Frank we see the vulnerable victim of an oppressive regime, whereas, to me, Charlotte could have been living now. Her paintings and her train of thought were so contemporary – even her sort of depression.”
After Kristallnacht in 1938, when Nazi stormtroopers and civilians went on a violent rampage against the Jewish community, Charlotte fled to Nice to live with her grandparents, but only began painting following the suicide of her grandmother at the outbreak of the Second World War, 18 months later.
The death had opened a Pandora’s box of disturbing family secrets. Sixteen members on her maternal side had taken their own lives (her mother and aunt among them) and Charlotte, who had always felt a tug towards depression, turned to art in an attempt to ward off death.
“I suppose she would be known now as a ‘manic depressive’,” says Candida. “But there was a feeling, particularly from her father, that this ran through the bloodline, which is quite disturbing when you consider what was going on with the Nazis and their eugenics at the same time. So it had been hidden from Charlotte. She didn’t know her mother had thrown herself out of a window, she thought she had died of influenza. This was a very intense spur for her creativity.”
Charlotte chose about 750 gouaches out of the 1,300 painted during her time in Nice, often activated or inscribed with music, snatches of conversation and quotations from German literature, mingling fantasy with reality and she called this collection Life or Theatre? It is a time when Charlotte was living comfortably, despite her disturbing family revelations. Nice was a refuge for all the Jews who had fled from Europe, jokingly called “The Promised Land” because of Vichy’s unoccupied status.
Candida continues: “Very little of this huge body of work is actively political. There are only about three paintings which actively relate to Nazism, although there are occasional things like benches with ‘Aryans only’ on them. But the majority of it is her life story, which is an extremely tortured one.”
The Promised Land proved to be a mirage. Within six weeks of the Nazis invading, all of the Jews had been cleared out. In a final act of preservation, the recently married and pregnant artist entrusted her paintings to a trusted friend with the words: “Keep this safe – it is my whole life.” Hours later, she was herded onto the train for Auschwitz and never seen again.
After the war, her paintings found their way to her parents who, at a loss for what to do with them, left them in a box for ten years. Eventually her stepmother donated them to the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam, where they have remained ever since.
Candida, who co-founded the Fine Art School Hampstead (whose alumni include Orlando Bloom and Helena Bonham Carter) in 1982, first crossed paths with Saloman at an exhibition of the artist’s work at the Royal Academy in 1998.
“I thought they were amazing,” she remembers, “but I didn’t think about writing a play about them or her. But she hung about in my mind, because she was female, because she was so young and I suppose for most of my adult life I’ve worked with creative students of a similar sort of age.”
An exhibition of Charlotte’s paintings (facsimiles of the originals sent from the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam) will be hung on the walls of the New End foyer for the duration of the play’s run.
The play is set in the four days it took Lotte to get from Vichy to Auschwitz, but Candida promises it is not as morose as it might sound.
“I tried to give a sense of wit or irony to some of the flashbacks, as there is in her paintings,” she says. “She’s an incredible observer and she also had very complicated affairs – one never knows whether they were full affairs or obsessions.
“A large amount of paintings are given over to this man she calls ‘Amadeus’, the music teacher of her step mother, who seems to be having an affair with both of them.
“In Jewish art history circles she’s very well chronicled. We know an incredible amount of detail about her journey: the weather conditions and so forth, we know it was Yom Kippur on day three. We know she went on the line that ran straight to the gas chamber and she died the day she arrived. But no one can actually know the end. It’s a bit of my artistic freedom to decide whether she was found out as being pregnant or whether the pull of suicide that supposedly ran in her family actually made her want to freely walk towards her death.”
In choosing her fate, Candida reasons, Lotte transcended the dehumanising slaughter of the gas chambers, turning it into a bold, emancipating act of free will.
She continues: “I visited the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam, places she lived and read more books about that period than I ever thought I would, but what I kept coming back to was the paintings, because I think the paintings actually tell you everything about her. I think the more people who know about Lotte the better. She’s got an inspiring spirit.”
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