Monica Bohm-Duchen – författare

Charlotte Salomon was born in Berlin in 1917 and was murdered at Auschwitz at the age of twenty-six. While in exile in the south of France from 1940 until her deportation in 1943, she created some 1,325 small gouaches using only the three primary colors plus white. From these she gathered nearly 800 into a work that she titled Life? or Theater?: A Play with Music, which employs images, texts, and musical and cinematic references. The narrative, informed by Salomon's experiences as a talented, cultured, and assimilated German Jew, depicts a life lived in the shadow of Nazi persecution and a family history of suicide, but also reveals moments of intense happiness and hope. The tone of the gouaches becomes increasingly raw and urgent as Salomon is further enmeshed in grim personal as well as political events. The result is a deeply moving meditation on life, art, and death on the eve of the Holocaust.Salomon's art, discovered after the war in the south of France where she had left it for safekeeping, was first exhibited in 1961 and has gained steadily in reputation since then. A major exhibition focused on Life? or Theater? appeared at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1998, subsequently at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Jewish Museum in New York City. This book, lavishly illustrated with many color plates, is the first to analyze Salomon's work critically, historically, and aesthetically. It includes a chronology of Salomon's life and a list of exhibitions of Life? or Theater? Featuring contributions from prominent art historians, literary and cultural critics, and historians, Reading Charlotte Salomon celebrates the genius and courage of a remarkable figure in twentieth-century art.Contributors: Mieke Bal, University of Amsterdam; Monica Bohm-Duchen, independent art historian, London; Darcy Buerkle, Smith College; Christine Conley, University of Ottawa; Mary Felstiner, San Francisco State University; Reesa Greenberg, Concordia University and York University; Shelley Hornstein, York University; Griselda Pollock, University of Leeds; Nanette Salomon, The College of Staten Island/CUNY; Astrid Schmetterling, University of London; Michael P. Steinberg, Cornell University; Edward Timms, University of Sussex; Ernst van Alphen, University of California, Berkeley, and Leiden University

Insiders/Outsiders, published to accompany a UK-wide arts festival of the same name in 2019, examines the extraordinarily rich and pervasive contribution of refugees from Nazi-dominated Europe to the visual culture, art education and art-world structures of the United Kingdom. In every field, émigrés arriving from Europe in the 1930s - supported by a small number of like-minded individuals already resident in the UK - introduced a professionalism, internationalism and bold avant-gardism to a British art world not known for these attributes. At a time when the issue of immigration is much debated, the book serves as a reminder of the importance of cultural cross-fertilization and of the deep, long-lasting and wide-ranging contribution that refugees make to British life.Contributions by: Richard Aronowitz, Harriet Atkinson, Michael Berkowitz, Morwenna Blewett, Monica Bohm-Duchen, Charmian Brinson, Andrew Chandler, Hans Christian Hönes, Leyla Daybelge, Rachel Dickson, Keith Holz, Amanda Hopkinson, Shauna Isaac, Swantje Kuhfuss-Wickenheiser, Simon Lake, Sarah MacDougall, Anna Müller-Härlin, Sir Norman Rosenthal, Anna Nyburg, Michael Paraskos, Antony Penrose, Alan Powers and Daniel Snowman

The first complete monograph devoted to the work of one of Britain’s most powerful and original contemporary artists. David Breuer-Weil studied at the Central Saint Martins School of Art and Clare College, Cambridge. From the late 1980’s until the late 1990’s he worked as a specialist in Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary art at Sotheby’s, London and as a curator for de Pury and Luxembourg Art in Geneva. He subsequently embarked on the epic series of apocalyptic works now known as the Project, over three hundred monumental paintings, a cycle that is arguably one of the most profound and consistent achievements in recent British painting. His determination to produce an art that deals with momentous and challenging themes is a reaction to a world he knows well, in which “art often seems to be reduced to a commodity”: “In my own work I consciously avoided the high polish, commercial, slick look of much contemporary art. I wanted to produce colossal, un-commercialized images of existential doubt”. This lavishly illustrated monograph presents a collection of paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations and studio shots.