To paint her life

by Mary Lowenthal Felstiner

A courageous Jewish artist who left behind a monumental archive of paintings comes alive in this extraordinary biography. Charlotte Salomon, born in Germany in 1917, exiled to France in 1939, spent the next two intense, suspenseful years creating a lifetime's work - more than seven hundred watercolors overlaid by written texts and tunes that captured the dramatic events of her own life. This luminous work stands alone in the history of art and of autobiography. It is the most innovative record we have from the midst of the Holocaust, a visual path through those dark times. Salomon's work survives intact in Amsterdam, but until now no one has unfolded the real life behind the painted one. Mary Felstiner now accomplishes exactly that, after ten years of searching for and interviewing Salomon's relatives and classmates, her mentor's students, her acquaintances in exile, and survivors of the concentration camps. Merging their memories with exhaustive archival research, Felstiner shapes an