Art Review: Chagall: Love, War and Exile

JEWISH PRESS
By Richard McBee

The Wedding Candles (1945) by Marc Chagall

NEW YORK---Groundbreaking and courageous. The current exhibition at the Jewish Museum has tackled what is easily the most vexing subject in the career of the most famous of Jewish artists: Marc Chagall (1887–1985) – namely, his persistent, indeed obsessive, use of the crucifixion as a symbol of Jewish suffering and persecution. The exhibition: “Chagall: Love, War and Exile,” under the expert direction of Senior Curator Emerita Susan Tumarkin Goodman, has traced Chagall’s lifelong fascination with the emblem of Christianity, especially in his work created during the Holocaust. [link]

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2013 A&O Prize for Museum Exhibition is “Chagall: Love, War and Exile”

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS
By TAHLIB

NEW YORK---The board, and the members of Alpha & Omega Project for Contemporary Religious Arts are pleased to announce the 2013 inductee for museum exhibition of the year: "Chagall: Love, War and Exile". This exhibit of Marc Chagall’s paintings at New York’s Jewish Museum includes many images of the Jewish Jesus, a subject of great interest in recent years by museum curators as exemplified by the blockbuster impact of "Rembrandt's Jesus" of 2012. "It's a  relatively new exhibit, that has already helped with the rebuilding of the Jewish-Christian relationship" explains Gregory Disney-Britton, chairman of Alpha Omega Arts. "It increases our capacity to talk about our similarities in ways both groups have chosen to forgot." The Jewish Museum of New York's “Chagall: Love, War, and Exile,” ends in February 2, 2014.

Since 2008, Alpha Omega Arts has been surveying members about the influence of Religious Art in the United States, and awarding the ALPHA OMEGA PRIZE.

"Persecution" (1941) by Marc Chagall

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Marisa Martin Wonders if Marc Chagall was a Christian Believer

WND
By Marisa Martin

"Exodus" by Marc Chagall

NEW YORK---The most famed Jewish artist in history created more than 100 startling crucifixion scenes, but didn’t anyone think to ask him, “Why?” Many writers and art historians claim that Chagall was a secular artist, and to a point that seems true. He was not a particularly observant Jew, but claiming his interests in the Bible were motivated to protect his heritage alone doesn’t match his words, much less his work. Quoted in Jackie Wullschlager’s biography, Chagall claims to have been “captivated by the Bible” since early childhood: “It has always seemed to me and still seems today the greatest source of poetry of all time.” Did Marc Chagall struggle with the possibility that Christ is the Jewish Messiah? [link]

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Chagall’s Dark Side on Display in New York

TABLET MAGAZINE
By Chavie Lieber

Detail of "Fallen Angel" 

NEW YORK---Most people associate the work of Jewish modernist painter Marc Chagall with with dynamic colors illustrating Eastern European Jewry’s vibrant folk culture. But Chagall also had a deeper, darker side to his art, one that reflected the artist’s tormented conscience after witnessing Europe’s anti Semitism, persecution, and poverty in the years leading up to the Holocaust.
 “Chagall: Love, War, and Exile,” a new exhibit at New York’s Jewish Museum open through February 2, 2014, offers 53 pieces of the artist’s work that explore the darker ethos of Chagall. Focusing on the years between 1930 and 1948, during the rise of fascism and the Holocaust, the exhibit provides a visual reckoning with the emotions that plagued the artist. [link]

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Resurrecting Chagall’s Jesus at the Jewish Museum

ART NEWS
By Robin Cembalest

"Persecution" (1941) by Marc Chagall, pastel, gouache and watercolor on paper.

NEW YORK---Marc Chagall is the prototypical Jewish artist, whose green Fiddler on the Roof became an enduring symbol of the precarious, joyful life of Eastern Europe’s Jews. He is less celebrated, though, for his paintings of another iconic figure who obsessed him throughout his career: Jesus. Starting with a line drawing of the Crucifixion he made in 1908 while studying art in St. Petersburg, Chagall depicted Christ on the cross dozens of times. Some Chagall Christs resemble the Eastern Orthodox icons the artist knew from his childhood in Russia. Others don’t look like the Christ in churches anywhere: they wear Jewish prayer shawls in place of a loincloth, and sometimes Tefillin, the leather boxes Jews strap to their foreheads and arms. [link]

The Jewish Museum, New York: “Chagall: Love, War, and Exile,” (Opens September 15) 1109 5th Ave at 92nd St, New York, NY; (212)423-3271, thejewishmuseum.org.

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