‘MARC CHAGALL: FOSTERING A FAMILY OF IMAGES’ IN ROSEN. A. 'IMAGINING JEWISH ART'

‘MARC CHAGALL: FOSTERING A FAMILY OF IMAGES’ IN ROSEN. A. 'IMAGINING JEWISH ART'

This is a summary of Chapter 1 of Rosen’s book: ‘Imagining Jewish Art: Encounters with the masters in Chagall, Guston and Kitaj’ (2009, Legenda). 

The Introduction to this work by Rosen was summarised in this blog on 22 October 2014.  Chapter 2 of Rosen’s book, on Phillip Guston, was summarised in this blog on 16 March 2015.  Chapter 3 of Rosen’s book, on R B KItaj, was summarised in this blog on 19 May 2015.

Marc Chagall was born in 1887; he died in 1985.

Marc Chagall: Fostering a Family of Images

Chagall was born in 1887 in Vitebsk – then in Russia and now in Belarus – and in 1910 he moved to Paris.  He decided that his future as an artist lay in Paris and that it could not thrive in Russia. 

Chagall observed that the artistic tradition of his homeland was that of Christian icon painting, and that while he valued this tradition and considered Christ ‘a great poet whose poetical teaching had been forgotten by the modern world’, the Russian, Christian tradition remained strange to him.

Rosen’s aim is to explore Chagall’s identity as a Jewish artist.

Rosen discusses ways in which some of Chagall’s works indicate the artist’s alienation from the Christian artistic tradition.  His ‘Pregnant Woman’ of 1913 can be read as an irreverent observation on the immaculate conception of Jesus Christ. His ‘Abraham and the Three Angels’ of 1956 is a re-working of Rublev’s icon ‘The Holy Trinity’ of 1410-1420: instead of presenting the angels of Genesis 18 as a prefiguring of the Christian Trinity, Chagall has the angels with their backs to the viewer.

Rosen asks why Chagall felt so comfortable in Western Europe where the Christian tradition in art is also dominant.  Rosen quotes Harshav, who states that Chagall would have come to Western art in the same way as a newcomer who encounters all periods of art history as parallel galleries in a museum.  This would have stimulated Chagall’s creativity.  In this setting, for Chagall Christ is no longer Christ of the icons but Christ the ‘great poet’.  Thus, the New Testament and the Western tradition of art become for Chagall a source of stories and symbols, and in paintings with a New Testament setting Chagall introduces his own life-story.  In contrast, when Chagall paints from the Old Testament, these external references are less common.

Rosen refers to research that has been done by Meyer Schapiro which shows how, in some of his paintings of Old Testament subjects, Chagall has been influenced in his compositions by the works of Rembrandt and Ribera.  In his ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ of 1956 Chagall has added a Hasidic Jew who points at Jacob.  This, states Rosen, is Chagall showing that Jacob’s dream is a specifically Jewish story with promise of future blessings by the Lord for the Jewish people.

In Chagall’s ‘Promise to Jerusalem’ of 1956, Chagall refers to the promise made to Israel by the Lord in Isaiah 54: 7.  For Chagall this would have been an assertion of future hope for both the Jewish people after World War Two and for himself as he mourned the death of his wife Bella.

Thus, Rosen shows, Chagall finds ‘spiritual teaching’ in the Christian Old Testament and ‘poetical teaching’ in the Christian New Testament.  The crucifixion is the primary New Testament image that Chagall draws on. 

Chagall and the crucifixion

Rosen will examine how Chagall approaches the crucifixion before, during and after World War Two.

Rosen refers to the novel by Chaim Potok: ‘My Name is Asher Lev’.  Asher Lev is a young Hasidic Jew struggling to reconcile his ability to paint with his religious upbringing.  He takes tuition from a secular Jew who instructs the young artist to study paintings of the crucifixion in order to learn about composition and the handling of space.  After a while Asher Lev protests that he wants to see no more crucifixions, but his teacher challenges him with the assertion that the history of art is predominantly a non-Jewish history, and that this is exemplified by the crucifixion.  An artist must engage with the crucifixion if he or she is to be found in the history of art. 

This would have been particularly challenging for Chagall – a Jew originating in the Pale of Settlement.  In Chagall’s move away from Russia he was assisted in meeting this challenge by being able to encounter the Western artistic tradition in the galleries and museums of Paris.

Chagall himself commented on this in 1931 when he stated that ‘Jews perform a kind of purging function’ in bringing to birth ‘an age of free creators …. when people were people and not calculating machines, and society immediately recognized the creators and not their imitators’.  Chagall understands himself as a Jewish artist, not imitating the past but adopting it so that he may stand alongside it as a family member.  It is only by being a member of the Western artistic family that Chagall may see and understand his childhood and youth.  Chagall identified in particular with Rembrandt, whose ‘rich emotionality’ and treatment of figures in his paintings resonated with Chagall as he sought in Western Europe for understanding of his Jewish European heritage.  Rosen states that Rembrandt also appealed to other Jewish artists – specifically Guston and R B Kitaj.

Chagall also identified with other artists from the Western tradition: Rosen will look at Chagall’s post-war crucifixions in the light of the work of Matthias Grunewald (c1475 – 1528). 

Chagall’s crucifixions changed during World War Two

Chagall’s ‘Dedicated to Christ’ of 1912 is one of his earliest masterpieces.  From the writings of Chagall it is apparent that the Christ figure is himself as a child and that the two figures standing by the cross are Chagall’s parents.  The style is that of Paris in 1912, and specifically of the Orphism of Robert Delaunay.  In this painting Chagall rejects the Christian icons of his youth, subverts Christian doctrine and asserts his own identity.  In his own writings in 1977 Chagall asserted: ‘For me, Christ has always symbolised the true type of the Jewish martyr.  That is how I understood him in 1908 when I used this figure for the first time […..] It was under the influence of the pogroms.  Then I painted and drew him in pictures about ghettos, surrounded by Jewish troubles, by Jewish mothers, running terrified with little children in their arms’. 

Rosen states that Jewish artists had previously painted crucifixion scenes in response to persecution by Christians – both as an indictment and as an appeal for justice. 

‘Dedicated to Christ’ shows the twin poles of Chagall’s painting of the crucifixion throughout his life: expression of his Jewish identity, and as an appeal against persecution; Christ as the ‘great poet’, and Christ as ‘the true type of the Jewish martyr’.

Before World War Two the primary mode for Chagall is as Christ the Jewish martyr with his paintings being appeals for justice; after the war Chagall tends more towards Christ as poet. 

In 1930 Chagall had not painted the crucifixion since ‘Dedicated to Christ’, but in this year he travelled to Berlin and then to the south of France ‘shaken by a premonition of Jewish catastrophe’: he painted his ‘Vision of Christ on the Cross’.

Chagall’s ‘White Crucifixion’ of 1938 includes scenes of attacks on Jews in Nazi Germany.  There is no-one watching at the foot of the cross; the ladder for the deposition is burning; there is no hope of redemption or resurrection.

In 1944, after he learned of the destruction of Vitebsk and of the scale of the Shoah, Chagall painted ‘The Crucified’: in the snow death pervades the shtetl as if in an inversion of the Passover; bodes are attached to crosses and the artist sits on a rooftop as the silent witness.

In 1941 Chagall and his wife Bella left France for the USA where they settled in New York City.   Chagall was a double exile: from both Russia and France.  He kept the company of those who spoke French, Russian and Yiddish: his English was only rudimentary.  Chagall came to understand the crucifixion as an expression of his personal alienation and his helplessness as the events of the Shoah took place.   In 1941 Chagall had produced a small gouache: ‘Descent from the Cross’.  This is a deposition, but in place of the body of Christ is a body that is shown by the inscription above the cross to be that of the artist himself.  An angel gives to Chagall a palette and brushes, granting him revival in his art and the possibility that in his art there may be revival of the Jewish people.

The theme of the crucifixion was used by a number of Jewish artists during World War Two to communicate Jewish suffering. 

Chagall’s ‘Resistance, Resurrection, Liberation’ and Grunewald’s ‘Isenheim Altarpiece’

Chagall is unique in continuing to work to the theme of crucifixion after the war.  His triptych painted between 1937 and 1952 – ‘Resistance, Resurrection, Liberation’ - shows ‘overlooked elements of hope in Matthias Grunewald’s ‘Isenheim Altarpiece’ of 1515.  The original setting of the ‘Isenheim Altarpiece’ was an Anthonite monastery that cared for sufferers of ‘the burning sickness’.  Christ is shown as being ‘flayed and pestiferous’: ‘made in the image of the ergotics who prayed to him’. 

Rosen writes that the ‘Isenheim Altarpiece’, which was ‘discovered’ at the start of the 20^th Century, spoke to contemporary viewers of current-day horrors.  He writes that Picasso’s meditation on the work assisted him in achieving his ‘Guernica’ (1937). 

Rosen writes that the ‘Isenheim Altarpiece’ ‘served artists as an aesthetic model for coming to terms with the grisly images emerging from the liberation of Nazi concentration camps’.  He writes that Sutherland’s ‘Crucifixion’ of 1946 is influenced by images of emaciated corpses in death camps and that the iconography is that of the ‘Isenheim Altarpiece’.

Chagall worked with the ‘Isenheim Altarpiece’ in a manner that was more profound: he uncovered its ‘underlying promise of redemption’.  The altarpiece was a series of folding panels.  The crucifixion scene was followed in sequence by glorious images of triumph, redemption and salvation in Christ which would have been unfolded on feast days.  In this way the afflicted worshippers were given meaning and hope.  It is this succession of resurrection after crucifixion that is essential for Chagall after the Shoah.

The titles of the three panels in Chagall’s ‘Resistance, Resurrection, Liberation’ evolved as Chagall worked on the painting. 

‘Resistance’ extols the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943.  The crucified Christ is surrounded by energetic figures, some of them the fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto, but a figure lies on the ground at the foot of the cross – asleep or dead: it is the artist himself. 

In ‘Resurrection’ the body of Jesus is still, surprisingly, attached to the cross but the resurrection is found in the figure of Chagall, now alive and standing, and in the figure of John the Baptist, also once again alive, and serving as the herald of the coming of Christ.  ‘Liberation’ is a ‘flood of illumination’: Jewish life is revived; there is no risen Christ: the Jewish people, by their own efforts are revived.  Chagall shows that this revival will come through ‘the mortal hands of lovers, painters, poets, and fiddlers’ and it is only in this panel that he shows himself painting again. 

Chagall’s primary purpose of rapprochement

Rosen describes how Chagall’s own writings show that his primary concern in producing ‘Resistance, Resurrection, Liberation’, and in using the ‘Isenheim Altarpiece’ as inspiration, is that of rapprochement with the people of Germany. 

Despite the artistic and cultural heritage of Germany, its people failed in their humanity.  Hitler was an artist and yet he had pursued a vision of death and destruction for Jews.  The descendants of the great Western European artists had eliminated the Jewish people, and thus ‘the ashen air of the Shoah not only begrimed the canvases of the Gemaldegalerie and the Alte Pinatothetek, its miasma hung over the whole of Western Art’.

Chagall’s post-war crucifixions state that the artistic past is now both available to Jews and a means of asserting a Jewish future.  Art history is to be the field of peace-making.  Chagall has repainted the great German masterpiece of the ‘Isenheim Altarpiece’: he has asserted that he is both a brother of Jews who died in the Shoah and the son of the German Grunewald.