BWW Reviews: Jewish Museum Reveals the Darkness and Thoughtfulness of Marc Chagall

Unlike many of his fellow modernists, Marc Chagall is both impossible to dislike and difficult to respect. He certainly had one of the most endearing methods in modernist painting--a method that threw together inverted houses and soaring streets, blue cows and yellow birdmen, rabbis and lovers and huge flying clocks, all executed in scrubby brushstrokes and gemstone colors. Part Vitebsk Jewish homebody, part continental European cosmopolite, Chagall always delivers a few ingratiating surprises. If you find Russian abstract artists like Kandinsky and Malevich aloof, affected, and condescending (which they are, for both better and worse), Chagall is your man. But because of the frequent loveliness and approachability of Chagall's painting, even the best of his canvases--including the much-hyped and rightly-hyped I and the Village--can seem like Fiddler on the Roof on LSD. Or like marvelous-hued schlock, to put it less kindly.

Chagall: Love, War, and Exile at the Jewish Museum flips this situation; taken together, the 53 paintings and drawings on display make Chagall a little harder to relish and a lot easier to respect. At the center of the exhibition are Chagall's World War II-era paintings of Christ and the Crucifixion--which, as curator Susan Tumarkin Goodman explains in her catalog preface, transform "the story of Jesus's martyrdom" into "an effective expression of the Holocaust." These canvases don't overturn Chagall's reputation for whimsy, but they do impart an indelible dark magic to the experience of looking at him, image by brutal image. As never before, his paintings can be mentioned in the same breath as the devilishly dreamlike novels of Dovid Bergelson, the raucously vicious prose poetry of Osip Mandelstam, the quick and concussive short stories of Isaac Babel--works by other Russian Jewish masters who responded to 20th-century traumas, and responded with the same combination of loving technique and ideological blunt force that is so present in these Chagalls.

Having already witnessed the wicked, leering imagination that Chagall brought to his work for the theater--and believe me, Chagall's monster costumes always have been and always will be the best thing about Stravinsky's Firebird--I feel like I should have seen this coming. But I didn't, and because the Jewish Museum starts the exhibition with innocuous flight-of-fancy canvases like The Lovers and Lovers Among the Lilacs, maybe you won't either. To some extent, Love, War, and Exile is a tribute to the private romances that sustained Chagall while the civilization he loved was seething and disintegrating. Composed in the 1930s, the Lovers paintings are tributes to Chagall's beloved first wife Bella, who appeared and reappeared in Chagall's iconography until her sudden death in 1944.

Chagall also started tamping down his style during the 1930s, for various reasons and with uneven results. Between 1934 and 1935 he executed a true-to-life portrait of Bella, and executed it with all the misplaced sentiment and technical clumsiness of a high school junior taking a studio art elective. In his fine catalog essay, "Fluid Chaos Felt by the Soul", Kenneth E. Silver offers a possible explanation for such missteps: "A veritable flood of turbulent imagery was the aesthetic rule of Chagall's oeuvre. It was as if even the artist's slightest attempt to tame or normalize his subject matter might lead to a stifling of his creative flow." Nonetheless, Chagall's uncharacteristic reserve could serve poignant aesthetic purposes. This is what happens in the superb 1933 canvas Solitude, which has many of the ingredients of a stereotypical Chagall--rabbi, violin, angel, village, personified livestock, so on and so on--and none of Chagall's typical exuberance. It's as though Chagall, remembering Russia's history of anti-Semitism and looking toward Europe in worry, has temporarily put his colors and his fantasies on hold, bracing himself for the hell to come.

Then the onslaught begins. Calvary, The Crucifixion, Descent from the Cross, Christ Carrying the Cross, Christ and the Artist, In Front of the Picture--as you walk deeper into Love, War, and Exile, Chagall's renderings of Jesus's suffering and death assail your eyes. These Christian-themed paintings aren't simply from one stretch of Chagall's career; while Calvary is a smoothed-down Cubistic composition from 1912, the crammed and uneasy In Front of the Picture is dated 1968-1971. And the Christian motifs are themselves open to considerable transformation; in Resurrection at the Edge of the River (1947), a horizontal Christ soars through a corrosive red sky, while in Flayed Ox (1947), the slain animal of the title is a likely stand-in for the more usual crucified Savior. Because Goodman has grouped the paintings not by strict chronology but by theme and tone, the cumulative effect of those Christs, those shadows, those confused and tormented onlookers is inescapable, overpowering.

Despite the tortured allure of Chagall's bolder and darker creations, the Jewish Museum is determined to end this showcase with reassurance and color, lots and lots of color. A final section called (drumroll, please...) The Colors of Love pulls together paintings such as The Juggler, Anniversary Flowers, The Wedding Candles, The Flying Fish, and Cow with Parasol. If those titles don't indicate what a cheery affair The Colors of Love generally is, I don't know what will.

Yet in the most intriguing of these final canvases, the consolations are uneasy. For example, Chagall's Self-Portrait with Clock has the air of a hard-fought return to whimsicality; the Christ motifs are reiterated, but toned down, and Chagall himself is portrayed as a thoughtful red goat. Peaceful enough, but observe this painting for a little while and it leaves a new impression. You may notice that the scene is uncomfortably cluttered and that the figures seem to be forcing their way right into your own space. You may also remember the vibrant reds of Resurrection at the Edge of the River and Flayed Ox and realize that Chagall uses much the same red in the Self-Portrait, repurposed but still fraught. Chagall, and the sensations left by his body of work, can never be the same.

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