Chagall: art as resistance

Overview

Recall questions on Chagall's life, the Nazi campaign against degenerate art, the Pale of Settlement and Hasidism, The Fiddler, The Praying Jew, tallit and tefillin, Solitude and White Crucifixion, the Jewish identity of Jesus, pogroms, and art as resistance.

What you need to know

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Questions from this subtopic

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1. 1

   Who was Marc Chagall, and what shaped his work?

   Model answer

   Chagall was born Moishe Shagal in 1887 in Vitebsk, in what was then the Russian Empire and is now Belarus, the eldest of nine children in a poor Hasidic family; his father worked in a herring warehouse and his mother kept a small shop. He studied art in St Petersburg, which required a permit for a Jew to live there, and went to Paris in 1911, where he absorbed the fragmented forms of Cubism and the intense colour of Fauvism without adopting either programme. He returned to Russia during the First World War, held a brief official position in art after the revolution and founded an art school in Vitebsk, then left for Moscow and in 1923 for France. He fled occupied France for New York in 1941 with help from an American rescue operation, returned to France after the war, and worked until his death in 1985, latterly on stained glass and large public commissions. His subject matter came almost entirely from the world of his childhood.

2. 2

   What was the Nazi campaign against so-called degenerate art?

   Model answer

   The regime classified modernist art as degenerate, condemning it as un-German, as the product of mental illness, and as Jewish and Bolshevik in inspiration, and set it against an approved style of heroic realism. From 1937 a commission removed many thousands of works from German public collections. An exhibition of confiscated works opened in Munich in July 1937, deliberately hung in crowded and chaotic rooms with mocking captions, alongside details of the prices museums had paid; it was staged in parallel with an exhibition of officially approved art and drew very large crowds as it toured. Artists so classified were dismissed from teaching posts, forbidden to exhibit and in some cases forbidden to paint, and were policed. Many emigrated; some were later murdered. Confiscated works were sold abroad for foreign currency at auction, and a large quantity was burnt in Berlin in 1939.

3. 3

   How did the campaign against degenerate art affect Chagall?

   Model answer

   His work was confiscated from German collections and shown in the Munich exhibition, so he was among the artists publicly held up for ridicule, as both a modernist and a Jew. He was living in France, which gave him some protection until 1940. After the fall of France he lost his French citizenship under the Vichy racial laws and was arrested in a police round-up in Marseille, being released only after intervention. With the help of an American rescue committee working to extract endangered artists and intellectuals he escaped through Spain and Portugal to New York in 1941. He continued to paint Jewish subjects throughout, which is one of the reasons his work is discussed as a form of resistance.

4. 4

   What was the Pale of Settlement, and what was shtetl life like within it?

   Model answer

   The Pale was the western region of the Russian Empire, covering much of present-day Belarus, Lithuania, Poland, Moldova and Ukraine, to which most Jews were legally confined from the late eighteenth century until 1917. Residence in major cities was restricted, many occupations and forms of landholding were closed, and quotas limited entry to schools and universities. Within it much Jewish life was concentrated in small market towns, the shtetls, where Jews were a large part of the population, spoke Yiddish, and organised life around the synagogue, the study house, the market and the religious school. Poverty was widespread and religious observance dense. From 1881 the region suffered repeated waves of pogroms, and the combination of violence and restriction drove mass emigration. Chagall was born into this world and painted it for the rest of his life.

5. 5

   What is Hasidism, and how is it reflected in Chagall's painting?

   Model answer

   Hasidism is a revival movement that arose in eastern Europe in the eighteenth century, associated with the figure known as the Ba'al Shem Tov. It emphasised joy, fervour and cleaving to G-d in ordinary life rather than scholarly attainment alone, valued wordless melody and dance as means of devotion, and organised communities around a rebbe regarded as a spiritual guide. It was strongly opposed at first by the scholarly establishment. Chagall grew up in a Hasidic family, and although he was not an observant adult, commentators consistently read his work against this background: the everyday shot through with the miraculous, figures who float free of gravity, animals that behave like people, and the absence of any firm boundary between the ordinary world and something beyond it. The role of music in his paintings, and the recurring fiddler, belong to the same world.

6. 6

   What does The Fiddler show, and how has it been read?

   Model answer

   A violinist with a green face stands astride the roofs of a snow-covered wooden town, one foot on a roof and one on the ground, playing while a small crowd and a few houses occupy the background and a figure appears in the sky. The fiddler was a real presence in the towns of the Pale, playing at every stage of life from birth to marriage to burial, so the figure stands for the continuity of the community and for the way its life was marked by music. The precarious footing on the roof is usually read as the position of Jewish existence in the Russian Empire: creative, celebratory and never secure. The green face and the scale of the figure against the houses remove the scene from ordinary observation and make it a memory or an emblem rather than a record. The image later gave a popular name to a musical about the same world.

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