[Ads-l] A very straightforward garden path

[Chris Waigl]

I just came across a headline in my morning reading that, for being very
simple and only offering a single, not very complicated syntactic
wrinkle, still has enough confusing things going on to fill 10 min of
internet searches for comparison and clarification. The headline, from
The Forward, and also the subject of the email with the morning's news
selection, is "Holocaust Victim And Alleged Murderer To Get Solo Show In
Amsterdam".

Step by step:

  * "Holocaust Victim": This refers to the painter Charlotte Salomon
    from Berlin. It turns out, "victim" is to be taken literally, as in
    she was murdered in Auschwitz in 1943, after being arrested in Nice
    (Vichy France).
  * "And Alledged Murderer": I initially thought this referred to a
    second person, as in someone involved in her murder, or a murderer
    she may have known, but...
  * "To Get Solo Show In Amsterdam": ... then how would it be a solo
    show? Furthermore, this formulation felt odd for a historical figure
    as she doesn't have much to gain any more from a solo show in 2017,
    does she? It seems to me that "X is getting a solo show" tends to
    refer to living artists or at least very recently deceased ones that
    are still part of the ongoing arts scene. A bit of searching finds
    that for historical artists, "Museum X is hosting/opens a solo show
    of/for..." or "The Portrait is a solo show about Gustav Klimt" is
    more common. I don't find much along the lines of "Gustav Klimt to
    get a solo show in X", though there are some examples that detail
    whether or not museums have given female artists solo shows,
    referring to artists from many eras.

The murderer story is about one of Solomon's diary entries, executed in
watercolor, that describes that she poisoned her grandfather (a subject
of one of her portraits) shortly before her arrest by the Gestapo. It is
unclear if this entry is a confession of a real fact or a fictional
invention.

Anyway, in case you're in Amsterdam, this looks interesting:
http://forward.com/culture/381299/charlotte-salomon-amsterdam-holocaust-victim-murderer

Chris Waigl


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