Griselda Pollock University of Leeds Staging Subjectivity: Love and Loneliness in the Scene of Painting with Charlotte Salomon and Edvard Munch AbstrAct This paper proposes a conversation between Charlotte Salomon (1917–43) and Edvard Munch that is premised on a reading of Charlotte Salomon’s monumental project of 784 paintings forming a single work Leben? oder Theater? (1941–42) as itself a reading of potentialities for painting, as a staging of subjectivity in the work of Edvard Munch, notably in his as- sembling paintings to form the Frieze of Life. Drawing on both Mieke Bal’s critical concept of “preposterous history” and my own project of “the virtual feminist museum” as a framework for tracing resonances that are never infuences or descent in conventional art historical terms, this paper traces creative links between the serial paintings of these two art- ists across the shared thematic of loneliness and psychological extremity mediated by the legacy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Keywords: Edvard Munch, Charlotte Salomon, subjectivity, painting, loneliness, Friedrich Nietzsche. Text Matters, Volume 7, Number 7, 2017 DOI: 10.1515/texmat-2017-0007