For a Jew, the great painter Marc Chagall, was intriguingly obsessed with the person of Christ. The exhibition Chagall: Modern Master,<\/i> at the Tate in Liverpool until next month, powerfully immerses the visitor in a dream world of love and cruelty, birth and death, myth and magic in which floating figures, symbolic shapes and strong emotive colours conjure a new kind of psychic reality.<\/p>\n
Marc Chagall was born Moyshe Shagal in 1887 in Vitebsk, a city in what is now Belarus, where Jews, who were banned from key parts of Russia, were tolerated. Revealingly Vitebsk\u2019s 60,000 inhabitants were split almost equally between Christians and Jews. That balance had a significant impact upon his formation as an artist. The division created in him not a dichotomy but an enriched ambiguity.<\/p>\n
One of the first pictures in the exhibition is Birth <\/i>painted in 1910. \u00a0Chagall, the eldest in a large family, was around for the birth of all seven of his siblings. The painting depicts a scene in a Jewish shtetl<\/i> in which the men wait with anticipation in a gaggle for news from the birthbed. But with the cow at the back of the room, wise men at the door, and the father secretly present at the birth, the scene has echoes of the Christian nativity, crossing boundaries in a way which was to characterise Chagall\u2019s entire career.<\/p>\n
The forcefield of energy which was Chagall is an extraordinary fantastical mystical jumble of images \u2013 of his native Russian homelife, \u00a0of the woman who was to be the love of his life, and of scenes of Paris where he widened the artistic horizons which had blossomed in Russia. It is a world which pays homage to Orthodox iconography as much as to the influence of avant-garde Western art.<\/p>\n
There is no doubt how important his Judaism was \u2013 the Hebrew scriptures and the community are constantly represented in his art.\u00a0 He quoted the Torah in Yiddish to the end of his life. But one of its most striking paradoxes is the way that in a number of paintings Jewish and Christian images sit side\u00a0 by side and play off one another.\u00a0 Chagall\u2019s Wandering Jews move amidst a landscape dominated by churches and suffer beneath the shadows of Christ upon the cross.<\/p>\n
Chagall painted more than 100 scenes of Jesus and the crucifixion throughout his life. After early allusions it was absent from his work for two decades until the figure of Jesus made an eerie return in 1930 after the painter, on a visit to Berlin, witnessed an increasing tide of German anti-Semitism and was seized by a premonition of catastrophe. But it was from 1938, when news of the Nazi concentration camps began to leak through to the outside world that Christ on the cross became a recurring emblem.<\/p>\n
The device was controversial. Many who had approved of this quintessentially Jewish painter \u2013 reductively dubbed the Jewish Picasso \u2013 were unhappy not just at these paintings but also when Chagall later accepted commissions to make stained glass windows in cathedrals.<\/p>\n
But Chagall was untroubled. He referred proudly to \u201cthis little Jewish people who gave birth to Christ and Christianity\u201d. He saw in the suffering of the Jews the suffering of all humanity and the innocent man on the cross as its emblem symbol. His Jesus often wore a prayer shawl for a loincloth on the cross.<\/p>\n
His painting War<\/i> \u00a0is the most powerful example at the Tate exhibition. But perhaps the best example is the new Pope\u2019s favourite painting White Crucifixion<\/i> in which the figure of Christ is illuminated by a shaft of light. \u201cIt isn\u2019t cruel, rather it\u2019s full of hope,\u201d Pope Francis has written. \u201cIt shows pain full of serenity. I think it\u2019s one of the most beautiful things Chagall ever painted.\u201d It is why Chagall is an artist of shared humanity.<\/b><\/p>\n
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The Church Times<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For a Jew, the great painter Marc Chagall, was intriguingly obsessed with the person of Christ. The exhibition Chagall: Modern Master, at the Tate in Liverpool until next month, powerfully immerses the visitor in a dream world of love and cruelty, birth and death, myth and magic in which floating figures, symbolic shapes and strong […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,345],"tags":[668,719,669],"class_list":["post-8139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion","category-review-culture","tag-marc-chagall","tag-religion","tag-tate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8139"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8139\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8142,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8139\/revisions\/8142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}