Painting As Performance: Charlotte Salomon's Life? or Theatre?

Charlotte Salomon's 1942 series of paintings, Life? or Theatre?, into which she incorporates elements of music and drama, wonders whether life and theatre are polar opposites or an engaged dialectic. Salomon anticipated the advent of performance theory by insisting on the performative qualities of her paintings. Her art exists in the unstable, ever-changing space between past and future, fact and fiction, life and death.