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...