In September, 2002, the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, in collaboration with the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, presented some 80 paintings and works on paper by Marc Chagall, drawn from the collection of the Israel Museum, the Tel Aviv Museum, and private collections. The exhibition, curated by Stephanie Rachum, highlighted the images that have made Chagall such an important figure in the history of modern art worldwide, with a particular emphasis on works inspired by his Jewish heritage and connection to Israel.
Marc Chagall (1887-1985) holds a unique place in the history of modern art. Although he came into contact with and was influenced by the major styles and movements of the early 20th century, Chagall's poetic art remained distinctively his own. His paintings are characterized by the confluence of his Jewish and Russian background and modern European art trends. These variant strands were then woven into a very personal mode of expression. In part this individual idiom was the result of the Hasidic traditions that permeated his home life in Vitebsk, the town where he was born and spent his youth. The breakdown of the barriers that separated visions and reality in his paintings was a natural extension of the mystical milieu that surrounded him. The use of symbolic images was inherent in his Jewish heritage. Often his subjects included aspects of Jewish life, portraits of Jews, and everyday life in the shtetl.* He translated these into visual metaphors, flights of fancy unbounded by the laws of logic or gravity.
Together with the fantastic aspects of his work, Chagall was also a realist. The majority of the people and places he depicted were grounded in his immediate surroundings, and much of his poetic imagery, once deciphered, proves to be an expression of a concrete, historical or autobiographical reality. Biblical subjects as well, tended not only to retell ancient stories but are also often imbued with additional meanings that reflect the artist's hopes and world view. Yiddish sayings take on concrete form and intermesh within overall motifs. Somewhere between realism and visual metaphor, Chagall invents his own language.
Marc Chagall paid his first visit to Palestine before the State of Israel was founded and maintained a continuous connection with the country throughout his life. He conceived and executed important projects here, particularly in Jerusalem, and made significant contributions to a variety of institutions. Among his many friends in Israel were artists and art historians, politicians, businessmen - people from many walks of life. During his lifetime, Chagall visited Israel eight times, extending the breadth of his acquaintances and the depth of his involvement with each visit.
Accompanied by his wife Bella and his daughter Ida, Chagall came to the country first in 1931. The main reason for this visit was a commission he had received from the Parisian art dealer and publisher, Ambroise Vollard, to do a series of illustrations to the Bible. He travelled a great deal, painting and drawing in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Safed. The country left a vivid impression on him, and back in Paris the light and landscape he had seen were echoed in many of the etchings for his work, The Bible.
In 1951, the opening of large retrospective exhibitions of his works, in Jerusalem, Haifa and Tel Aviv, prompted Chagall's second visit, and in 1957, he was again in Israel following the publication of his illustrations to the Bible. Vollard had died shortly before World War II and Tériade published the commission that had finally been completed in 1956. A second book of Bible illustrations was published by Vervé, also in that year. Ida Chagall Meyer, the artist's daughter, gave the Israel Museum 11 original drawings for the lithographs in that work.
The inauguration of his 12 stained-glass windows for the synagogue of the Hebrew University's Hadassah Medical School in Jerusalem in 1962 brought Chagall to Israel once more. A year later, he came again in order to discuss the iconographic themes for a large-scale decoration for the new Knesset building.
Marc Chagall last visited Israel in October, 1977, when he was 90 years old. During this final trip he accepted two distinguished honours. The city of Jerusalem conferred on him the title "Worthy of Jerusalem," and the Weizmann Institute of Science awarded him an honorary doctorate.
Marc Chagall was born and raised in Vitebsk, a modest provincial town in White Russia (today Belarus), when about half of its population of 50,000 were Jews. Although there were some impressive stone structures, most of the houses, especially in the poorer section where Chagall grew up, were built from timber. Small businesses proliferated. Domesticated animals lodged in backyards. Despite its shortcomings, Chagall had an affectionate attachment to his native shtetl, a bond that he retained throughout his life. While the majority of his adult years were spent in France, for him Vitebsk would never become a vision of his past. It remained forever alive, and a setting in his paintings, for feelings and experiences that touched his innermost core.
Chagall's connection to Vitebsk may originally have been due in part to the security that the shtetl provided its Jewish citizens. Elsewhere a Jew was an alien, a foreigner to be treated with hostility. In Vitebsk, though subject to certain restrictions, Jewish rituals could be practiced openly and Jewish inhabitants formed a significant part of the intelligentsia and bourgeoisie. Being a particularly sensitive youth, Chagall absorbed all the sights, sounds, customs, and festivals that made up his environment. The people, the surrounding countryside and the culture of his hometown, steeped in the traditions of Hasidism, left an indelible mark on him. He painted his family, the houses, churches, synagogues, and streets that his eyes recorded, and his memory preserved. Jew and non-Jew, peasant and teacher, beggar and poet all found their way into his depictions. Everyday life and the characters that peopled his world were recalled in scenes replete with humour and wit. Thus he revealed the myths, the faith and the traditions of the local population. Memories from his early years and his Russian-Jewish background proved to be a source that continuously inspired his work. Chagall's portraits of his shtetl pay homage both to a lifestyle that has disappeared and to the values it propagated. In the 1930s and early 1940s, when the world that Chagall remembered was being brutally crushed, he chronicled the disasters that befell the Jews of Europe in symbolic images, against the background of Vitebsk. This terrible destruction did not, however, deter him from continuing to include Vitebsk scenes in his paintings until the end of his days.
Absent from his early work, religious themes began to appear in Chagall's work only around 1912, and were perhaps the artist's answer to the much-discussed problem of how to create a modern Jewish art form. Among these religious themes, one of the most prevalent images in his work at that time and thereafter was a Jew holding a Torah scroll or a prayer book. The figures in these paintings were always male, and the human presence is confined to only one person. Often they donned the accoutrements of prayer, the tallith or prayer shawl, and the tefillin (phylacteries), attached to the left arm and forehead that contained verses from the Pentateuch. Perhaps it was the memory of his devout father that inspired many of these images. In his autobiography, Chagall recalled: "Day after day, winter and summer, at six o'clock in the morning my father got up and went off to the synagogue."
In 1930, Chagall was invited to participate in the Parisian Colonial Exhibition as a guest in a pavilion devoted to art from Palestine. Though the planned pavilion failed to materialize, the invitation led Chagall to a renewed consideration of the question of the creation of contemporary Jewish art. In that same year, Meir Dizengoff, the mayor of Tel Aviv, visited Paris and invited Chagall to come to Palestine for the Purim festival and the laying of the foundation stone of the Tel Aviv Museum. The new museum was to include a collection of reproductions and prints of masterpieces depicting biblical heroes and events. Also, it was in 1930, that Ambroise Vollard had commissioned Chagall to create his Bible illustrations. All these events contributed to the artist's decision to undertake his 1931 voyage to Palestine, in order to see first hand the Land of the Bible.
The stained glass windows representing the 12 Sons of Jacob from whom descended the 12 Tribes of Israel, in the synagogue of the Hadassah Hebrew University Medical Centre in Ein Karem, Jerusalem, were dedicated on February 6, 1962. Chagall and his assistant Charles Marq, worked on the windows for two years. Marq developed a special process of veneering pigment on glass, which allowed Chagall to use as many as three colours on a single uninterrupted pane, rather than being confined to the traditional technique of separating each colour by lead strips. Chagall was present at the dedication and spoke of the joy he felt in bringing this gift to the Jewish people, with whom he felt a deep sense of identification. "All the time I was working," he said, "I felt my father and my mother were looking over my shoulder, and behind them were Jews, millions of other vanished Jews of yesterday and a thousand years ago."
In the summer of 1960, Kadish Luz, then the Speaker of the Knesset, was introduced to Chagall, and an agreement was reached regarding the artist's participation in decorations for the projected new Knesset building. Chagall was enthusiastic about the work, which became a gift from him to the Jewish people and Israel. For Chagall, this was an opportunity to express his interpretation of the entire history of his people, and its focal point - the Land of Israel and Jerusalem. Upon the completion of the work in 1969, Chagall declared: "I have visited this land many times and each meeting with it deepened in me my ties to it, so that I wished to leave here some sign of this bond.... Now I and my creations have entered the Parliament of Jerusalem, the Knesset - in its hall, on its walls and floor..... Thus I became close to the land.... I felt as though I had been born anew. No longer am I as I was."
* Small towns and villages with a large Jewish population in the Pale of Settlement, the only place where Jews were allowed to reside in the Czarist Russian Empire