Imagining Jewish Art

Encounters with the Masters in Chagall, Guston, and Kitaj

Aaron Rosen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351563192
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Short-listed for the Art and Christian Enquiry/Mercers' International Book Award 2009: 'a book which makes an outstanding contribution to the dialogue between religious faith and the visual arts'. What does modern Jewish art look like? Where many scholars, critics, and curators have gone searching for the essence of Jewish art in Biblical illustrations and other traditional subjects, Rosen sets out to discover Jewishness in unlikely places. How, he asks, have modern Jewish painters explored their Jewish identity using an artistic past which is- by and large - non-Jewish? In this new book we encounter some of the great works of Western art history through Jewish eyes. We see Matthias Grunewald's Isenheim Altarpiece re-imagined by Marc Chagall (1887-1985), traces of Paolo Uccello and Piero della Francesca in Philip Guston (1913-1980), and images by Diego Velazquez and Paul Cezanne studiously reworked by R.B. Kitaj (1932-2007). This highly comparative study draws on theological, philosophical and literary sources from Franz Rosenzweig to Franz Kafka and Philip Roth. Rosen deepens our understanding not only of Chagall, Guston, and Kitaj but also of how art might serve as a key resource for rethinking such fundamental Jewish concepts as family, tradition, and homeland.

CHAPTER 1
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Marc Chagall: Fostering a Family of Images

Throughout his career, Marc Chagall always credited his native Russia, and especially his hometown of Vitebsk, as ‘the soil which had nourished the roots of [his] art’.¹ At the age of twenty-three, however, Chagall became convinced that his art could only flourish in the ‘lumière-liberté’ of Paris.² As many commentators have observed, Chagall’s decision to leave St Petersburg for Paris in the summer of 1910 signals a key moment in Chagall’s artistic development. Frequently overlooked, however, is the critical window which Chagall’s departure for Paris opens up for our understanding of the artist’s Jewish identity.

By relocating to Paris, Chagall made a conscious decision to affiliate himself with the artistic traditions of Western Europe.³ On the one hand, the decision was motivated by Chagall’s belief that France represented the Western frontier of avant-garde art. From the vantage point of Paris, the art of his native Russia struck Chagall as hopelessly ‘condemned by fate to follow in the wake of the West’.⁴ Beyond that, however, Chagall’s decision to emigrate from Russia derived from a deep-seeded sense of alienation. ‘In the Louvre, before the canvases of Manet, Millet, and others’, says Chagall, he began to understand ‘why my alliance with Russia and Russian art had not worked’.⁵

During his early years as an artist in Vitebsk and St Petersburg, Chagall found that ‘the refined art of my native country was religious art’.⁶ He comments:

I recognized the quality of some great creations of the icon tradition — for example, the works of Rublev. But this was essentially a religious, a [Christian] Orthodox, art; and as such, it remained strange to me. For me, Christ was a great poet whose poetical teaching had been forgotten by the modern world.⁷

Thus, while Chagall was inspired by Russian icon painting — ‘my heart was quiet with the icons’ he said after seeing the icon collection at the Alexander III Museum in 1910⁸ — as a Jew the tradition ultimately felt inaccessible to him. Early in his career, in such works as Pregnant Woman from 1913, Chagall did occasionally draw direct inspiration from icons. Referencing the well-known twelfth century Znamenie icon in Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery, Chagall’s painting features a fully formed infant inside its mother’s womb.⁹ Yet, rather than demonstrate Chagall’s over-arching affinity with icon painting,¹⁰ even this work highlights Chagall’s uneasiness with the tradition. As Ziva Amishai-Maisels points out, Chagall’s Pregnant Woman, with her two heads, one in bearded profile, seems less a reverent reworking of the Znamenie icon than an ironic ‘in-joke’ about the (im)possibility of a virgin birth.¹¹ While Chagall might prefer the work ‘to be accepted, as it has been, as a naïve, fantastic, and therefore harmless paraphrase of an icon’, Amishai-Maisels argues that in this and other artworks Chagall ‘hides an often shocking meaning which can be best explained as a reaction to his own shock on coming in contact with a Christian environment’.¹²

Chagall’s Abraham and the Three Angels (1956), as well as his numerous painted recapitulations of the scene, underscores the point. The best-known image of this scene from Genesis — in which Abraham provides a meal for three strangers who turn out to be messengers of God — is Andrei Rublev’s The Holy Trinity (c. 1410– 20). In Rublev’s icon, with which Chagall undoubtedly was familiar, three angels sit serenely facing the viewer. While these angels have often been interpreted as a prefiguration of the Christian Trinity, Chagall consciously distances himself from any such christological associations. He reintroduces the figure of Abraham, and — most importantly for our purposes — reverses the positions of Rublev’s angels. As the re-imagined angels tuck into their feast with their backs to the viewer, so too Chagall symbolically turns his back on the tradition of Russian icon painting.

But why is it that Chagall feels more at home in the Western art-historical tradition than the school of Russian icon painting? After all, if it is the Christian milieu of Russian art which makes Chagall so uneasy, why is he not similarly unnerved by the Christian messages and symbols which underwrite so much of Western art history? We need only think of some of Western art’s most enduring images — Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, or Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece — to understand just how deeply the history of art has been coloured by the history of Christianity.

Whereas his Jewishness inhibited his ability to engage with Russian art, Chagall found that this same identity actually endowed him with a position of creative freedom when he encountered the tradition of Western art. Benjamin Harshav explains:

As a Jew from the Pale, [Chagall] came to European history from outside that history, and for him all periods were parallel to each other, like so many rooms in the Louvre. To use André Malraux’s term, all of art history was for him a musée imaginaire. His was not a revolution against the art of a past that he or his parents had grown up with, saw in museums, or studied in school; and he lacked the shock of a historical upheaval.¹³

By coming from outside the Western tradition, Chagall was able to write his own art-historical narrative. In this narrative Jesus is no longer a messianic figure, as Chagall perceived him in the Orthodox icon tradition, but instead ‘a great poet’.¹⁴ The New Testament — and all the attendant Christian themes and references of Western art — become for Chagall not so much part of a scriptural or religious canon as a literary and art-historical canon; one in which Christian stories and symbols signify less about the Christian faith than they do about Chagall’s own position as a Jewish artist.

This conception of Christian imagery becomes especially clear when we set it in relief against Chagall’s approach to imagery from his own religious tradition, in particular scenes from the Hebrew Bible. As we shall see later in this chapter, when Chagall depicts images from the New Testament he makes frequent allusions both to his own artistic dilemmas and to the works of other artists. When he turns to the Old Testament, as he did in his Bible illustrations — a suite of 105 etchings begun as a commission by Ambroise Vollard in the 1930s and finally completed in 1956, these referential concerns fade to the background. Looking at Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife (1956), Jean Rosensaft does spot a plausible self-portrait in the face of Joseph as he shrinks away from the grasp of his employer’s lustful wife.¹⁵ Still, not only is this resemblance more the result of a salty chuckle on the artist’s part than serious self-reflection, it is also a relative anomaly in a series notably lacking the self-portraits so common in Chagall’s work.

Art-historical allusions in the Old Testament series are slightly easier to identify than potential self-portraits in the series. In the seminal analysis of these works, Meyer Schapiro recognizes loose parallels between Chagall’s Sacrifice of Manoah (1956) and Rembrandt’s The Archangel Leaving the Family of Tobias (1637), as well as between Chagall’s David Playing before Saul (1956) and Rembrandt’s treatment of the same episode.¹⁶ More concretely, the posture of Jacob in Chagall’s Jacob’s Ladder (1956) recalls Jusepe de Ribera’s Jacob’s Dream (1639) in the Prado.¹⁷ Yet even in this instance, the strongest such correspondence of the series, Chagall deliberately reverses Ribera’s layout, leaning Jacob in the opposite direction and propping him up on the opposite hand. Furthermore, while Ribera never illuminates the content of Jacob’s dream, Chagall explicitly takes the viewer into the biblical narrative, including two angels ascending a ladder marked by the Hebrew name of God. Chagall also adds to this image a floating, topsy-turvy Hasidic Jew who points down at Jacob’s head. This curious figure not only further distinguishes Chagall’s vision from that of any artistic precursor, it also underscores for Chagall the importance of Jacob’s dream as a specifically Jewish story, bearing a distinctly Jewish promise. The Lord promises Jacob that his ‘offspring shall be like the dust of the earth’, and assures him of his enduring presence: ‘Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you’ (Genesis 28.13–15).

Throughout Chagall’s Bible series, and the many works he generates from it,¹⁸ this religious message — God’s abiding love for the people Israel — supersedes Chagall’s concerns with his own artistic identity. Tellingly, in many cases Chagall chooses to illustrate biblical passages with little prior tradition of illustration, as in his Promise to Jerusalem (1956), where he portrays the poignant assurance which God makes to Israel, symbolically represented as a forsaken wife, in the Book of Isaiah: ‘For a brief moment I abandoned you, but with great compassion I will gather you’ (Isaiah 54.7).¹⁹ These words to the people Israel would have addressed Chagall at both a communal and personal level after the Second World War, when he not only mourned the devastation of the Jewish people but the death of his beloved wife Bella in 1944.²⁰ This spiritual reassurance which Chagall finds in the Old Testament stands apart from the ‘poetical teaching’ he recognizes in the New Testament; a place he turns to not so much for religious understanding as for artistic self-reflection.

Out of all the potential imagery in the New Testament, the crucifixion plays by far the most important role in Chagall’s artistic meditations. In this chapter I want to look specifically at how his treatment of the crucifixion develops up to and through the Second World War, followed by the transition in his deployment of the theme in his paintings after the war. Examining a series of three canvases completed in the late 1940s, I hope to suggest that in the immediate post-war years Chagall began to recognize the full potential of the crucifixion as an iconographical arena in which both to investigate as well as to establish his place within the history of Western art.

The centrality of the crucifixion for Chagall is perhaps best framed by drawing upon an episode from Chaim Potok’s novel My Name is Asher Lev. The protagonist in Potok’s work — based on both Chagall²¹ and Potok himself; a former painter — is Asher Lev, a young Hasidic Jew struggling to reconcile his religious upbringing with his precocious talent as a painter. Under the direction of his community’s Rebbe, Lev begins studying with the sculptor and painter Jacob Kahn, a secular Jew.²² In a formative lesson, Kahn guides Lev through the crucifixion paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which he uses to demonstrate ‘the development of structure and form and expression, and the handling of pictorial space’.²³ The pa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• 1 Marc Chagall: Fostering a Family of Images
• 2 Philip Guston: Recasting the Past, or How to Make a Golem
• 3 R. B. Kitaj: The Diasporist Unpacks
• Conclusion: Brushes with the Past
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index