Seeing the Chagall show at the Jewish Museum in New York made me recall the year when Marc Chagall (1887-1985) was 90 and I decided it was high time that he, my favorite Jewish artist, and I meet. But first let me tell you about the current Chagall exhibit.
Until Feb. 2, lovers of Chagall’s works can see a fine selection of his paintings that were done between the early 1930s and 1948. Titled Love, War and Exile, the exhibit of 31 paintings, 22 works on paper and assorted photos and letters have been drawn from various public and private collections.
For me, Chagall was the ultimate Jewish artist of the 20th century. He combined artistic intelligence, vivid imagination, sensitivity to and awareness of Jewish history, and deep-rooted Jewish knowledge, based on his early education and the ambience of his Chassidic family in Vitebsk, Russia. Moreover, his knowledge of Yiddish and Yiddish lore expressed itself in many of his works.
Chagall’s colorful and fantastic paintings, with lovers in the air, suspended candelabras, a disembodied painter’s palette, roosters, flower-bedecked cows and snow-covered villages are seen in plenitude. In this show, there are also many crucifixion scenes, for Chagall saw the Jesus figure as representative of the martyrdom of the Jewish people during the 1940s. He himself, his beloved wife, Bella, who figures in so many of his paintings, and his daughter, Ida, were fortunate enough to escape from France and come to the United States in June 1941. The war in Europe was raging and it was just several months before the United States entered the battle in December 1941.
Chagall’s depictions of Jesus invariably have him wearing either a tallis or a tallis-like loincloth, thereby accenting his Jewishness. Although some viewers conclude that it is only during the l940s that Chagall began to paint Jesus on the cross, Chagall painted Jesus as early as 1908, when he was in his late twenties.
To understand Chagall’s works, especially those that are related to thoroughly Jewish themes, a deep understanding of the Yiddish language and Jewish culture are needed. Alas, even museums, which supposedly have knowledgeable staff, err in their interpretation because of ignorance.
To understand Chagall’s works, especially those that are related to thoroughly Jewish themes, a deep understanding of the Yiddish language and Jewish culture are needed. Alas, even museums, which supposedly have knowledgeable staff, err in their interpretation because of ignorance.
A classic example is his painting “Over Vitebsk” (not in this show), which depicts a village and its rooftops, and over the houses floats a bearded figure, with cap and cane, holding a stuffed sack. I remember visiting a museum once with my father, Yakov, and seeing this famous Chagall painting. The curator went to great lengths describing the scene. Reading this banal description, my father laughed and said, “They don’t understand this painting because they don’t know Yiddish and they don’t know Yiddish folk expressions. What Chagall is doing here is visualizing a Yiddish phrase: ‘geyen iber dee hizer’ – ‘going over the houses’ – an expression that actually means ‘going from house to house begging.’”
So, then, without a knowledge of Yiddish lore, Chagall’s brilliant rendering of this scene is misunderstood. What was mistaken as a typical Chagall “floating” scene is actually a rendering of a Jewish beggar going from house to house, as Jewish beggars did all over Eastern Europe, trying to collect food to put in their sacks.
In this show, too, we have one of Chagall’s crucifixion scenes in a shtetl, where there is a huge fire on the left side of the painting. The description on the little card says that it is a kind of crossing of the Red Sea. However, in reality, it is Chagall’s depiction of the Holocaust, a visual rendering of the Yiddish expression “mayn shteytl brent” – “my town is burning.”
I don’t know if the Jewish Museum’s administration is aware of the coincidence, but in the room that shows many of the artist’s crucifixion canvases there is a rather large cross-shaped blue sofa where visitors can sit and view the paintings.
One of the most fascinating parts of the show for me was the Yiddish letter that Chagall wrote to the mayor of Tel Aviv, accepting an invitation to visit. His calligraphy is clear and beautiful, showing the early schooling he had in writing the Hebrew letters, and his Yiddish is fluent and evocative. After all, he is a native Yiddish speaker. On view too is a letter to Hermann Struck, to whom Chagall writes that he hopes his visit will be beneficial to his art. Struck is identified merely as a “printer.” Missing from the description is the fact that Struck himself was a noted artist, who wrote a definitive book on etching. Moreover, Struck was a former teacher of Chagall.
Accompanying this show is a comprehensive catalogue, co-published by Yale University Press, entitled Chagall: Love, War and Exile. In addition to the paintings on view, the book also has many other related paintings, an English translation of some of Chagall’s Yiddish poems, and photographs. One particularly engaging photo is one of Chagall sitting in front of his painting of Bella, right next to Bella herself, who poses wearing a black dress with lace collar and holding a white lace fan.
Now I’ll return to getting to see Chagall in St-Paul-de-Vence, a small town not too far from Nice, in the Provence region of southern France. To see a very private artist, whose visitors were controlled by his managerial second wife, Vava, was not easy. For such an attempt one needs, as the Israeli expression has it: proteksia – or “pull.” I knew the then president of Hadassah, Miriam Freund, who had worked closely with Chagall when that organization commissioned Chagall to make the stained glass windows for the famous Hadassah Hospital synagogue in Jerusalem.
I explained my wish to Miriam, who gladly said she would try to be helpful. She gave me Chagall’s phone number and preceded it with a call to Chagall, telling him that an American writer would like to visit him. She told him that I knew Yiddish, and stemmed from a family whose origins were in Russia. And then she told him one more crucial fact that I had told her might clinch the acquiescence. I knew that Chagall’s first wife, Bella Rosenfeld, stemmed from a family named Levant, which was Bella’s mother’s maiden name. I asked Miriam to accent the fact that our family name, Leviant, might very well be connected to Bella’s family. Miriam also mentioned that I would be in Switzerland during the summer.
In short, Miriam was told that when I was in Europe I should call Chagall’s house. I couldn’t wait. Soon as I arrived in a little town in Switzerland, I dialed the number that Miriam had given me. A woman answered the phone, probably Chagall’s wife, Vava. I introduced myself, told her I had gotten the phone number from Miriam Freund of Hadassah, and hoped I could make the visit to see Chagall, since in a couple of weeks we would be in Nice, and would actually be in the town of St-Paul-de-Vence.
The reply was a very brief message in French: “The master [le maître] is not accepting visitors.”
And, so, that was the end of my Chagall adventure. In person, but not on museum walls.
The final irony of Chagall’s long and productive life is that the Jewish painter – who throughout his long life encapsulated Jewish themes, Jewish imagery, Jewish expressions and Jewish religiosity – was buried by his second wife, Vava (herself a Jew, from a noted Russian Jewish family), in the local Catholic cemetery in St-Paul-de-Vence.
Curt Leviant’s most recent book is the short-story collection Zix Zexy Ztories.