Chagall's Bible: Mystical Storytelling.

Chagall's Bible: Mystical Storytelling

Museum of Biblical Art, New York City 

7 October 2008--18 January 2009

Chagall would have adored the title of the new exhibition of his work at the Museum of Biblical Art in New York City, 'Chagall's Bible: Mystical Storytelling'. Of course the very fact that Chagall would have revelled in the notion of himself as a 'mystical storyteller'--indeed, at the centre of the show, set out like evidence, is his Mystical Crucifixion, 1950--should also make us a little suspicious.

The challenge with Chagall is so often to love him in spite of himself, or rather in spite of the naive persona he fastidiously constructed for himself in writings and interviews. When the exhibition introduces us to Chagall's preparatory works for his windows in the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem, for example, an explanatory text reveals that Chagall found stained-glass to be' a transparent partition between my heart and the heart of the world ... colours and lines flow out, like tears from my eyes, though I am not crying.' While the curator is too shrewd to swallow this oozing sentimentality simply at face value--the placards in the exhibition reveal a scrupulous attention to iconographic and biographical detail--one senses that Chagall's vagaries were ultimately a bit too intoxicating to resist. Thus, as we enter the exhibition we are confronted with the following declaration: 'Chagall sought a perspective beyond the momentary and quotidian by which to probe and illumine the meaning of existence ... [he] created a style of mystical storytelling--a kaleidoscopic and non-sectarian sacred art as it were--by which he takes himself and the viewer to a place between heaven and earth.' Just what constitutes Chagall's 'mystical storytelling'--its derivations, techniques, and implications remains elusive, despite repeated references in the course of the exhibition.

If this notion falters as a conceptual tool for deciphering 'Chagall's Bible,' ultimately the fault may lie in the deceptive diversity of Chagall's approaches to the Bible during the long, almost Noahic span of his career. The artist comes closest to a palpable esotericism in his later biblical works, represented in this exhibition by his suite of lithographs for Verve magazine in 1956, the second Verve series from 1960, and his designs for the Hadassah windows installed in 1962. At their best, these series communicate via an inflamed palette which seems to spring from a genuine, ecstatic immersion in the biblical text. 'To read the Bible is to perceive a certain light and the window has to make this obvious through its simplicity and grace,' Chagall commented while working on the Hadassah designs, and the challenge of realising this metaphor opens by far the most promising grounds for chasing mystical trajectories in Chagall. Unfortunately, with only the opacity of photographs and colour lithographs of the Hadassah works to guide us in the exhibition, we glimpse only a sense of these possibilities. However much we might strain alongside the curator to read a 'personal mystical iconography' in the fauna which float through these images, Chagall's ubiquitous fish and goats--despite the biblical associations they might assume--feel like they are marking space more than opening up interpretive possibilities.

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Chagall is at his best, and his most spiritually insightful, not when he allows his sensibilities to waft to 'a place between heaven and earth,' but precisely when he brings his gaze down to earth. The process of etching, with its hunched, almost scribal exertions, seems to draw Chagall closer to the biblical text than any other media, and his Bible Series--begun in the 1930s as a commission from Ambroise Vollard and completed in 1957--reveal an artist who intuitively senses the most private fears, dilemmas and joys of the characters in the Old Testament. There is more grief here than we are accustomed to seeing in Chagall. Abraham weeps over the sarcophagal form of his wife Sarah in an early scene, Jacob grieves for Joseph, and later David for Absalom; others, like Jeremiah, are bowed in lamentation for the community. The patriarchs and prophets in these images dominate their respective compositions, squeezing all other elements to the periphery. Yet rather than the familiar, reassuring figures of veneration, Chagall reduces these great men to shuddering masses; in the case of Jacob, almost a heap of rubble. These are explicitly not presented as images for worship, and we approach them almost guiltily, sensitive that we have trespassed on private anguish.

Elsewhere in the series, Chagall playfully underscores his departure from existing modes of religious illustration, particularly the Russian Orthodox icon tradition he knew from his youth. Taking up the theme of Abraham and the Three Angels, Chagall gives a sly wink toward Andrei Rublev's The Holy Trinity, c. 1410-20 in which the figures of Abraham's angelic guests constitute a Christian typology. Chagall reintroduces the figures of Abraham and Sarah to the scene and reverses the positions of Rublev's angels. As these re-imagined visitors hungrily tuck into the feast before them with their backs to the viewer, so too Chagall symbolically turns his back on the tradition of Russian icon painting. Even angels--serene objects of contemplation for Rublev--become figures of earthly fascination for Chagall as they humorously jostle for position on their undersized picnic bench, their cumbersome wings brushing against one another.

While Chagall also tinkers with models from Rembrandt and Jusepe de Ribera in this series, it is remarkable as Meyer Schapiro notes--how seldom the more than one hundred images in the suite make reference to any established iconography. Often suspending the biblical narratives just before or just after familiar episodes, at their best Chagall's etchings have the effect of jarring loose our engrained images of the characters and events in question. To call this extraordinary imaginative intimacy with the Bible mystical might just be to give Chagall too little credit. This exhibition shows us all too well that Chagall can adorn the Bible in private symbolism and glittering colors. But he can also make it real.

Aaron Rosen is a Post-doctoral Fellow at Columbia University whose first book, Imagining Jewish Art, will be published by Legenda Press in 2009