The Missing Photograph

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED] I One hundred and twenty images into the cycle of 769 paintings that form an image-music-text, presented as a 'three-coloured operetta' and, titled, teasingly, Leben? Oder Theater?/Life? or Theatre? created in 1941-1942 by a twenty-five year old painter, Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943), we find the first full-face image of one of its key characters, Franziska (fig.1). A long oval face is surmounted by two mounds of brown hair that frame her forehead. Large, almond-shaped brown eyes gaze out from beneath strong brows. A long straight but full nose leads down towards half-opened red lips. The figure is dressed in a dark jumper that fits closely with a frill round her neck. The face is painted against a deep blue, otherwise plain, background. In the empty hollows on the page on each side of her face two, mirroring, death masks enter into the picture from each side of the frame. White, with closed eyes but red lips, their ghostly presences might explain the distress on the face of the 'character' who stares out of the image. On tracing paper laid over the image, and written in large red capitals in gouache in a pattern that descends across the face and upper body of the central female figure is written: 'Am I to blame for her death? my Franzchen asked herself '. The 'her' whose death seems to haunt the central figure may be the intruding, repeated face with the closed eyes and deadly pallor. From their place in the sequence of paintings/texts of Life? or Theatre? we know that the death masks represent the recently deceased younger sister, Charlotte, who committed suicide in 1913 of the pictured 'Franzchen.' The enunciator of the overlaying statement, however, is not in the image. Nor is she the author of the painting. 'She' is the mother of both the women in the picture, the living and the dead sisters. The image represents her memories of her daughters. A painting, 23 paintings earlier in the sequence, introduces the dive into memory as Scene 5 of the Prologue to Life? or Theatre? theatrically declaring that 'Mrs. Knarre has withdrawn entirely into herself and lets her tragic, troubled life pass before her eyes in her own poetic form.' (JHM 4254). (1) As if in hypertext, Life? or Theatre? has opened a wormhole into what the artwork invents as the memories of an old woman who has suffered terrible bereavements largely through suicides of many members of her family, including both her two daughters. (2) In this device of imagining her reflecting back upon her memories of her tragically burdened life, the viewer is made to see her daughters through the eyes of a mother who traumatically, unnaturally, outlived both her children. Scene 5 works like a cinematic flashback to create a subjectivity for a woman who, at the time the paintings were being made, was herself also dead, overwhelmed by grief and terror at the fascist conquest of France, through suicide. It is in this 'telling' of events leading to the death of 'Franzchen' that have already been narrated in the opening section of the work ((JHM 4179-4181) by means of a completely different visual mode and in a 'historical' rather than discursive manner that the viewer is brought 'face to face' with an image of Franziska. In painting 131 (fig. 2) another 'portrait' of Franziska occurs. Frontally and centrally positioned, this time the face appears in a reverse rhyme flanked by two other faces that seem to emanate from her head. Both face outwards and away from her. Far from pressing in to haunt her, they represent familial others who look away. These represent the woman's husband and daughter. Over this image lies a transparency on which we find reference to a melody: and the words: 'And my husband loves me not/ And my child, she needs me not/ Why, oh why am I alive ... So her thoughts ran in her mind'. The final phrase inscribes again the narrating mother's/ the outsider's point of view, or, for the work, the invisible (grand) maternal narrator telling us how Franziska feels; the verses are provided as her own song, reminding us of the operatic motif of the aria as interior monologue

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