Charlotte Salomon: Colours of the Soul

Charlotte Salomon was a young Jewish artist from a prosperous family whose mother committed suicide when she was just nine years old. She attended the School for Pure and Applied Arts until 1938 when the increasing antisemitic policies caused her to escape to the south of France to live with her grandparents. It was not the best of times. In 1941, now living alone she began painting what became over 1000 gouaches which she edited and added captions and overlays to create her life’s work. In 1943 she handed the work over to the local doctor in a large suitcase with the wish that he ‘Keep this safe, it is my whole life.’ By September that year she had married another German Jewish refugee, Alexander Nagler, and the two of them were arrested and she was transported to Auschwitz to the gas chambers when five months pregnant.