In 1942, Walt Disney was in the midst of the golden age, after the successive releases of Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi. In October of that year, the Institute of Arts at Kalamazoo University, in Michigan, opened an exhibition that showed stills from that dream factory alongside paintings by Chagall. “If he likes the fantastic prints of Walt Disney’s creations, he will understand and know how to value the somewhat cryptic fantasies of Marc Chagall’s dream world,” reads a letter from the time. Since then, this painter’s work has been associated with an innocent, even somewhat childish, dreamlike nature.
What the author of that enthusiastic letter overlooked is that neither its addressee, the German-born Jewish dealer Klaus Perls, nor the artist himself, who took refuge in New York after the Nazi occupation of France, had any reason to see the world in code. fairy tale. In 1942, Hitler could still win the war. The smoke from the extermination camps covered the skies of Europe with ignominy. Anti-Semitism was rampant not only in Germany, Italy or Poland, but also in the Soviet Union and the United States. Chagall, the author of those colorful daydreams, was stateless, persecuted, marginalized.
Because Chagall didn’t even have a stable name. He was born Moshe Segal in the Vitebsk region, present-day Belarus, into a Hasidic Jewish family. Although higher education was very restricted to Hebrews in the Russian Empire, he managed to complete high school and go on to study art with Léon Bakst in Saint Petersburg. There he used his Russian-speaking name, Moishe Zakharovich Shagalov.
In 1910 he settled in Paris, became friends with Apollinaire, Delaunay and Léger and became Marc Chagall. He allows himself to be immersed in surrealism and fauvism. But his fascination with Paris and its modernity will never alter the roots of his work, which draws from the Torah, Russian icons, Hasidic folklore and his childhood experiences in Vitebsk. Poetry and humor are the bases of an imaginative and vibrant style, which he experiments with color, space and form without giving up narrative or figuration. A painting as free from the academic burden as from the programmatic corset of manifestos and isms.
Unlike his palette, Chagall’s life soon became darker. After his first major exhibition at Berlin’s Der Sturm gallery, he returns to Russia to marry his fiancée, Bella Rosenfeld. The outbreak of the Great War will prevent him from returning, but in the newborn Soviet Union he will experience a brief period of effervescent optimism. As curator of Fine Arts of Vitebsk, he founded a museum and a popular art school, open to all avant-garde winds. However, in 1920 he was forced to resign due to disagreements with Kazimir Malevich.
After a period in Moscow, as a set designer for the Kamerny theater and a teacher of orphans from the Ukrainian pogroms, he understood that he had no future in Stalin’s USSR and returned to Paris. In 1933, a Nazi mob publicly burned his work The Rabbi. “It is very flattering to be despised by Hitler’s Germans,” he writes in an open letter, “but what will those brutes do with my paintings?”
The answer comes after four years, when the “Sunday painter”, as Chagall calls the Führer, includes three of them in the “Degenerate Art” exhibition. Others will be confiscated and secretly sold by the Third Reich. The artist, nationalized French in 1937, seems out of danger until the occupation of Paris forces him to flee to Gordes, in the south, where he does not feel safe either.
An invitation to participate in an exhibition at the MoMA, managed by friends and acquaintances, will serve as a pretext to facilitate his passage into exile. Chagall survives, but he will always carry with him survivor’s guilt, the image of millions of Jews massacred in the Shoah.
The naive apparent lightness of his art is inseparable from this set of traumatic experiences. Chagall’s characters float to rise above the horror, but without ignoring it. His work is not an evasion, but a conscious apology for joy, lyricism and peace as political weapons.
Its melancholic prophets, its fallen angels, its crucified Christs are warnings against totalitarianism, gratuitous violence and discrimination. He paints self-absorbed violinists and fantastic flying beings, but also mothers who howl in pain for their dead. The magic of the circus barely conceals the carnival tragedy of life. “Perhaps a revolution that does not lead to its ideal is also a circus,” he writes, disenchanted by the Stalinist drift.
The artist will explore new media during his last decades, such as sculpture, ceramics and glass. Without openly declaring himself a Zionist, he will support the creation of the State of Israel and demand accountability for the Holocaust, but his Judaism will always be, so to speak, ecumenical.
He created stained glass windows for the UN headquarters in New York and for several French churches. But the most difficult commission, which he reluctantly accepted, was the stained glass windows of St. Stephen’s Church in Mainz, Germany. His desire for peace overcame his resentment.
The exhibition “Chagall. A cry for freedom” can be seen in the Recoletos Room of Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid until next May 5.
