At the very end, the artist resolves to take herself “out of life for a while” and immerse herself in painting.Salomon was as good as her alter ego’s word. When she handed the finished paintings to her local doctor for safekeeping she said: “Take good care of it, it is my whole life”. It is hackneyed to observe that the Holocaust cost the lives of many artists who would have gone on to shape the aesthetic temper of the postwar world, but Charlotte Salomon’s paintings are resonant and unsettling proof of the opposite. In suppressing art, evil can also inspire it.’Life? or Theatre? The Work of Charlotte Salomon’ opens at the Royal Academy of Arts on 22 October.. Officially, poetry is a neglected art, a guttering flame which would die without the nurturing breath of public subsidy. The truth is that many thousands of people are secretly at it, and the flame is in danger of suffocating beneath a heap of unpublished manuscripts Most of them land on small magazines.

From the topmost tips of her hair down to the farthest joints of her small feet, her grief spreads throughout her body; it transcends her own suffering. It is the suffering of the world, the suffering of the fate that Mrs Knarre has been elected to bear.”Ralph Levie, director of the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam, believes the work’s litany of needless death is crucial to Salomon’s argument about life and art. Yet thanks to her adoring stepdaughter we can still gaze up at Paula/Paulinka on the concert platform, we can still see her thronged by admirers at a musical soiree and watch her dressing up to charm the Nazi official who once held her husband’s life in his hands She is the only strong female character in the story. Salomon’s suicidal blood relatives represent the other end of the spectrum, both in life and in art.In the painting describing her grandmother’s silent reaction to her second daughter’s suicide, Salomon writes: “Mrs Knarre does not cry, but her eyes seem to penetrate the profoundest depths of the world.

She was once beautiful, the toast of pre-war Berlin, but now, tended by a nurse, she is fuzzy “How sad it was in the end,” she says. The museum, a high-tech conversion of four Ashkenazi synagogues in the one-time Jewish quarter, is a centre for research into Salomon’s life.Paula and her late husband, Dr Albert Salomon, donated the works to the city’s Jewish museum Today, Paula Lindberg’s memory has faded almost to a blank. The sequence begins with a list of dramatis personae in which Salomon sets out pseudonyms for all the central characters: her stepmother, Paula, becomes an impossibly glamorous singer called Paulinka Bimbam; her father, an eminent surgeon, becomes Dr Kann; and her first love and artistic Svengali, the music teacher Alfred Wolfsohn, is transmuted into the Byronic figure of Amadeus Daberlohn. In the isolation of her supposed sanctuary in France, Salomon imagined all the jealousies, loves and despairs of her own youth.In particular she revisited the envious love she felt for her stepmother – a woman who at the age of 100 still lives close to the paintings’ home in Amsterdam. Calling herself Charlotte Kann, she fictionalised elements of her past and fashioned the libretto of a tragic operetta or “singspiel”. But it captured the hot and brutal Nazi impulse in bold colours “Destroy the Jews.

Take everything you can,” read the slogans she saw on Berlin’s shop fronts.Rosenthal concedes that a large part of the importance of Salomon’s work is its uncanny portrayal of life under persecution. The most obvious comparison is with Anne Frank’s celebrated journals. But he insists that Salomon’s paintings transcend their historical significance; they are not merely documents of an extraordinary time, but products of an artistic sensibility at once bleak and humorous.Surrounded by personal as well as political tragedy Salomon painted her own alter ego into her story. Despite the fact that her first art master was dismissed for being married to a Jew, she was relatively secure But Nazi ideas soon made inroads into her life. Her stepmother was told to stop singing in public, and her father was forced to give up his professorship at a general hospital.Her response to the encroaching mood of anti-Semitism in Life? Or Theatre? includes three or four street scenes depicting Nazi rallies and brutalities. Her memory might have blurred the details (she drew the swastika the wrong way, for instance).

Her Berlin, for example, is shown in increasingly sombre tones, while later, in the South of France, she seems to borrow the hot colours of Dufy and the sensual lines of Bonnard These might well have been conscious allusions. At the age of 19 Salomon was one of very few Jews admitted to the state art school in Berlin. “Salomon’s visual imagination is both serious and very, very startling.”Many of the paintings take comic strip form, with detailed sequences of events contained on one sheet of paper. Often the mordant humour and cartoon layout are reminiscent of a better-known graphic work on the Holocaust, Maus, by Art Spiegelman.