Painting the Word

M arc Chagall (1887-1985) —artist, poet, music and theater lover, and Russian Jew who became a citizen of France—lived for nearly a hundred years. During his lifetime he witnessed Russian pogroms, two world wars and the Holocaust. Chagall escaped personal injury, but endured the pain of exile. In his work one sees towns aflame, people slumped in grief, buildings falling and one crucifixion after another. Yet he retained a boundless energy and a childlike way of peopling a page. Like his contemporaries Matisse and Picasso, Chagall designed stage sets and costumes, stained glass, ceramics, tapestries and mosaics, and made engravings and lithographs. He illustrated books and painted with oils, gouache and watercolor. Chagall’s themes have enjoyed wide public appeal: he never tired of portraying lovers, family life, plants and animals, the circus or the Bible, which allowed him to reflect on the divine-human drama.

A significant exhibit of Chagall’s work on biblical themes is now on display (through Jan. 18) at the Museum of Biblical Art (MOBIA) in New York City. “Chagall’s Bible: Mystical Storytelling” presents three distinct sets of images: illustrations of the Bible, various crucifixion scenes and a set of signed, original 20-color lithographs of the stained glass “Jerusalem Windows” (1962), installed in a synagogue in Israel. Taken as a whole, the exhibit shows how biblical themes repeatedly made their way into the artist’s work and inhabited his imagination.

Illustrating the Bible

It was Ambroise Vollard, the Parisian art dealer and publisher of deluxe art books, who first suggested that Chagall, then 36, turn to the Hebrew Bible. Raised among Hassidic Jews in the village of Vitebsk, Byelorussia, Chagall had heard Bible stories from his youth. In preparation, he visited Holland to see Rembrandt’s work, which he revered, particularly his illustrations of the Bible. In 1931, Vollard underwrote Chagall’s visit to Palestine, Syria and Egypt, his first trip to the Middle East, so that he could see firsthand the people, the landscape and the sacred, historic places. “I saw the hills of Sodom and the Negev, out of whose defiles appear the shadows of our prophets in their yellowish garments, the color of dry bread,” Chagall said, many years later, recalling his first trip to Israel.

Between 1931 and 1939, Chagall made 65 biblical etchings (55 of which are in this exhibition). But the outbreak of World War II interrupted the project, and Vollard was killed in a car accident the same year. The artist fled France for New York, where he lived until 1948. It was not until 1952, after Chagall had resettled in France that he took up the project again. Over the next four years, he made another 40 images for Eugene Tériade, critic and publisher of the journal Verve, who had acquired Vollard’s collection of Chagall’s biblical illustrations. Tériade added Chagall’s new work and published the Bible in 1957, as portfolios and as sets of hand-colored prints. In 1960, Tériade and Chagall collaborated on another set of Bible images, colored lithographs for Verve magazine, some of which are on view in the exhibit as well.

The early etchings are black and white, often with dense dark patches or backgrounds. On 100 sets of prints, the artist colored by hand a particular area of the picture, often using a single color highlight. Roughly the size of a piece of paper, these images are so powerful that they seem much larger. Chagall focused his energies on the Book of Genesis and the stories of the Jewish prophets and kings. He illustrated familiar stories and brought to life familiar figures: Lot stands with his daughters, Abraham weeps over his dead wife Sarah—his hand covering his face in grief—and Jacob wrestles with an angel. Moses is always depicted with horns. In “Sacrifice of Abraham” a white, naked Isaac, arms bound behind his back, lies stretched across his father’s lap. A bearded Abraham, wearing the long black robe and large hat of an Orthodox Jew, holds the boy’s knee; with the other hand, he holds a knife, its blade pointed upward. Abraham gazes directly overhead, where a white winged creature (the angel of the Lord) swoops toward him to give whisper a new instruction. The image is similar to another in the series, “The Creation of Man” in which a white naked Adam, stretched out horizontally as if asleep, is carried by a male figure, presumably God, across a nascent landscape.

If the earlier set of etchings shows a gravity and density not unlike Rembrandt’s biblical illustrations, the lithographs tend to be much more colorful and spare, as though showing the influence of Picasso and Matisse, cubism and minimalism. Here the black is often reduced to a thin outline, and color itself provides the form, mood and background. “David and Bathsheba,” for example, shows a single, divided face—the frontal bearded part as David, and the female profile as Bathsheba; they wear the floating figures above their brows almost as a hat. 

In these lithographs, we see the crossing of the Jordan, Joshua and the law, Samson and Delilah, the lives of David, Solomon and Jeremiah. The final set shows still more fluidity of line and women of the Bible predominate, like Rachel, Sarah, Tamar and Ruth. Chagall’s depiction of Naomi and her two daughters imbues their interaction with a quiet affection, enhanced by subdued browns; the only use of primary color is the large red sun pulsating in the background. Chagall’s Esther towers over the city and its people—a measure of the artist’s regard for her role in saving Israel.

Crucifixions

Chagall’s use of Christian iconography has been variously interpreted and will likely remain controversial. While he seems to use the crucified Christ to address the suffering of the Jews during his lifetime, as an artist he was also interested in suffering as a universal condition. His crucifixion scenes convey suffering that is compassionate and has a purpose. Chagall also identified with Christ personally, as he himself expressed in a poem: “With Christ/ I am his high pupil/ hanging in tandem, we are lonely forever/ From the morning I was assigned/ my early destiny on the cross.”

Chagall also included the Madonna and the Holy Family in his work as early as 1910. Perhaps he laid claim to them as a Jew because, historically, the Madonna with child is a Jewish mother with her son, and the Holy Family is a Jewish family. Chagall’s facility with Christian and Jewish iconography in his art allowed him to receive commissions from both Christians and Jews. He designed stained glass for Christian churches in Kent, Zurich and Reims. That is not suggest that his motives were commercial. Chagall was a mystic. “I am against terms like ‘fantasy’ and ‘symbolism,’” Chagall said, “Our whole inner world is real, perhaps even more real than the visible world.”

In a large oil painting, “Quai de Tournelle” (1953), Chagall shows the sprawling city of Paris with a distinctly recognizable Cathedral of Notre Dame in the background, all in green; the sun—or perhaps it is the moon?—seems to be eclipsed, and above it flies a family in the embrace of a father figure. In the foreground Chagall has placed a curved crucifix in purple, and across the bottom of the canvas a red female nude reclines with her child; in her hands she holds a bouquet of yellow flowers. What does this juxtaposition mean? Perhaps it is autobiographical: the artist and his family were forced to flee Paris during the Nazi occupation. He returned to France after the war when he painted this canvas. The suffering has not disappeared from the scene, but neither does it dominate; the colors are still dark, but there is that bit of yellow, signaling hope.

Jerusalem Windows

Chagall was a logical choice as the artist to design the 12 stained glass windows for the synagogue at the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem. Each of the arched windows represents one of the twelve tribes of Israel. Chagall employs his full Jewish vocabulary, filling the space not with people—the congregation would supply the people—but with menorahs and candles, crowns, stars of David, the tablets and Torah scrolls, Hebrew writing, and a substantial bestiary including birds, fish, snakes, winged horses and other imaginary creatures. (None of his monsters look harmful, nor do the lions or wolves look threatening, regardless of what the accompanying text says.) Chagall has assembled the signs of the Jewish people, who are called out, given the covenant and the law, promised the land, and led there. The artist celebrates the new nation of Israel and this place of worship in Zion, the holy city. The effect is vibrant and cheerful; he seems unable to restrain his hopefulness.

In the images on display at MOBIA, which spans four decades of the artist’s labor, Chagall’s figures lead active lives. His fish swim, his animals leap, his people play instruments, sing, cry or dance; his angels flap their wings or hover effortlessly in space. Chagall exulted in primary colors and luminosity. His work expresses a lyricism and a joyousness that made him perennially popular despite the advent of many competing styles of art, many of which were wholly opposed to representation and figuration. For Chagall, figures mattered because life mattered, and it is in those figures that one can see the hand of God.