The youth cult is getting on a bit. In fact it’s 237 years old—if you date its origin to Rousseau’s Emile (1762), the first child-centered educational treatise. Perhaps the biggest change since then is that, whereas the Romantics were obsessed with spotless preteens, the twentieth century is fixated on fallen preadults. In keeping with that tradition, the South African-born, British-based artist Nicky Hoberman has specialized in lurid paintings of young girls ever since graduating from art school in 1995. She is being touted as one of the rising stars of British art, and her work is featured

In July 1940, faced with the threat of Nazi extermination, Charlotte Kann, the “strangely twin-natured creature” at the core of Charlotte Salomon’s Life? or Theatre?, 1940–42, faces a desperate choice: to commit suicide or undertake “something wildly eccentric.”

The phrase might be a description of Life? or Theatre? itself: a “singspiel” painted between 1940–42 in the south of France, where the young Salomon was in hiding from the Nazis. (Her attempt at escape failed; she died at Auschwitz in 1943 at the age of twenty-six.) Comprising nearly 800 gouaches, written overlays, dialogue, and notations