The Story of the “Quintessential Jewish Artist of the 20th Century”
Art has been an essential element of Jewish life and culture for millennia. Artifacts from the First Temple Period (around the second millennium BCE) show visual representations, mostly connected to rituals. Later, during the Second Temple period (dating from approximately 539 BCE until 70 CE), Jewish visual art primarily dealt with the admonition against graven images. For most of the Dark Ages, (the 5th through 15th centuries CE), most Jewish artists focused on subjects related to religious life. With the social restrictions that became widespread during the Renaissance and the Reformation, few Jewish artists openly identified as such over the next four centuries. The 20th century, though, saw the emergence of Marc Chagall, a Russian and French artist who openly identified as Jewish and predominantly featured Jewish themes and motifs in his art.
Chagall—The Early Years
Born Moishe Shagal in 1887 in Vitebsk, in what is now known as Belarus, Chagall was the oldest of nine children of Khatski and Feige-Ite Shagal. At the time, about half of the residents of Vitebsk were Jewish and the city boasted a number of synagogues. Chagall kept a diary as a youth, vividly describing the repression he experienced on a daily basis, noting that he felt “at every step…a Jew” because of the discrimination he faced almost constantly. Initially, because of his fear of being beaten or killed, he denied his Jewish heritage when confronted during a pogrom.
The Influence of Hasidic Judaism on Chagall
Chagall later wrote, in his autobiography entitled My Life, that he began to see how many Jewish traditions were disappearing as a consequence of the pervasive persecution throughout most parts of Europe. He saw this first-hand in his hometown, which had been a center of Jewish culture in the early 1700s but had lost most of its influence. As a youth, Chagall was banned from attending most public schools, so he received most of his early education at the local Jewish religious school. When he was 13, though, his mother paid the local headmaster 50 roubles to allow him to attend the regular high school. It was there that he had his first exposure to visual art.
Chagall Chooses a Life of Art
According to Chagall, before he attended the local high school, he had no exposure to art. His father was a herring merchant and his mother sold groceries. They had nine children and had no money for art, so their home had none. Chagall saw another student drawing a sketch with a pencil and paper and asked how he had learned to draw. He then made his initial attempts to replicate images that he saw in books.
At the age of 19, Chagall went to the studio of local artist Yehuda Pen, who took him in as a student at no charge. Chagall toiled for a few months, exclusively painting academic portraits, before striking out on his own. Moving to Saint Petersburg, the capital of the Russian Empire, he enrolled in an art school and stayed for two years, starting his lifelong work with landscapes and self-portraits. While there, he met and studied with Leon Bakst and became acquainted with the famed post-impressionist Paul Gauguin.
In 1910, Chagall moved to Paris, where he fell into the avant-garde movement, heavily influenced by both the Fauvist and the Cubist artists. Four years later, desperately homesick, he returned to Vitebsk, where he stayed through the First World War and the Russian Revolution. He married while there and brought his wife and family back to Paris in 1922, where they lived until the Nazis entered.
The Jewish Symbolism in Some of Chagall’s Work
While some Jewish artists chose to conceal their ethnicity, Chagall opted instead to openly express his Jewish heritage. Among the themes and motifs frequently appearing in his paintings are:
- Depictions of persecution, particularly during the late 1930s and the 1940s
- The White Crucifixion, which has Jesus wearing a tallit, or Jewish prayer shawl, instead of the stereotypical loin cloth, thereby emphasizing in the face of Nazism the reality that Jesus was Jewish
- 1913’s The Praying Jew, with early hints of Cubism, painted primarily in black and white
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