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July 14, 2006
A glimpse into the Mystery
Chagall's work reflects traditional Jewish life in Eastern Europe.
EUGENE KAELLIS
Because of the injunction (Exodus 20:4) against graven images that
might give rise to idolatry, Jews, for most of their history, were
rarely and unremarkably involved with the graphic or plastic arts,
except for ceremonial and liturgical material. But beginning with
the (incomplete) liberation of Jewish communities, their artistic
achievements became impressive. Pissarro, Soutine, Pascin, Lieberman,
Modigliani, the Soyers, Levine, Shahn, Gropper, Rivers, Rothko,
Szyk, Baskin, Epstein, Lipschutz, Gross and Chagall were eminent
in the development of new expressions in art and all achieved lasting
international acclaim.
Chagall's work broke new ground. Indeed, his paintings were the
first (in 1912) to receive, from Apolonaire, the label "surrealist."
Chagall occasionally used Cubist style, but most of his portrayals
are of more or less realistically rendered subjects in highly fantasized
circumstances. His people and animals are much more impressionistic
than those of, for example, Dali and Magritte.
Chagall's art has been referred to as deriving from "momentary
impulse" or "humorous by-play." Though serious, even
tragic, themes appear in Chagall's work along with romantic and
whimsical ones, an element of the comic is usually present and a
sense of the spontaneous is rarely absent. A floating figure of
a Jew, often with a tallit and tefillin, frequently bent and curved
like one of Blake's angels, brings to mind the luftmensch
(airhead) of Jewish shtetl life, a pious Jew who "lived on
air" because he had no means of support.
Chagall's sources, idiomatically Jewish, are basic and primordial,
endowed with a universal esthetic quality. Although growing up in
Vitebsk, Belarus, imprinted on him figures and symbols derived from
the Eastern European Jewish life of the late 19th century, he objected
to being called a "Jewish painter," diligently avoiding
facile, hackneyed and obvious symbolism, striving always for the
essence.
Indeed, Chagall's graphic language comes from the deepest layers
of the unconscious. It is a language to which people of the most
diverse backgrounds, cultures and times can respond. It invites
us to place ourselves in an agadic state of mind, to react on a
purely poetic level, to be receptive to a pictorial lyric fantasy.
Halachah is the body of Jewish observance and law; in contrast,
the agada consists of the myths, legends and folklore of
the talmudic rabbis. It deals with the indescribable rather than
the knowable, with totality rather than details, with another meaning
always at a level deeper than the obvious. For many Jewish scholars
and rabbis, agada has sometimes been a source of embarrassment because
of its earthy, imaginative, inflated, bizarre, even seemingly blasphemous
forms. Despite the often self-conscious and pretentious strivings
of our secular culture to "hang loose" and let impulse
and imagination reign, we are still bound by the canons of reason
and restrained by the conventions of form.
Abraham Joshua Heschel once wrote, "Halachah represents the
strength to shape one's life form according to a fixed pattern;
it is a form-giving force. Agada is the expression of man's ceaseless
striving, which often defies all limitations." Agada deals
with the ultimate Mystery from which all other mysteries derive.
Halachah is analytical, agada is holistic and inventive. Halachah
deals with law, agada with the spirit behind the law. Halachah is
verbal and literal, agada is intuitive. In current psychological
terms, halachah is left brain, agada, right brain.
Chagall's work, having, in many instances, cast aside the restraints
of gravity, also discards the constraints of time. Subjects and
themes from different eras appear in the same painting, much like
a talmudic debate in which one rabbi may refer to the comments of
another, centuries dead, as if his opinion were contemporary. The
chronological order of events may be discarded, implicitly accepting
the unity of everything in space and time. Indeed, as my wife once
so cogently observed, since infinity stretches out in all directions
and encompasses all time, we are at every moment living precisely
in the middle of everything, spatially and temporally.
Chagall had his critics. To some, he represented aspects of Jewish
life and history which they see as shamefully accommodating repression
and suffering. They claim that Chagall romanticized the shtetl life
of poverty, squalor and oppression and elevated the ineffectual
means many Jews used in dealing with their misfortunes. Some Israelis
objected to Chagall's frequent references to their country as "the
land of the Bible." For them, it is a hard-won haven still
struggling to survive.
In 1973, Chagall visited the USSR, where he received an impressive
welcome. As Soviet anti-Semitism became increasingly apparent, he
was criticized for his benevolent attitude toward Russia. Of course,
in this, he was not alone. Jews of various political persuasions
often retained for Russian culture a love as unrequited as it was
passionate.
Chagall's ecclesiastical art also disturbed some Jews. He justified
it by insisting that his work would lead Christians toward greater
respect for Jews, but he may have erred. One Christian source, praising
his mural at Notre Dame de Toute Grace, cited his "keen liturgical
sense despite his Jewishness."
Chagall escaped the Nazis by fleeing to the United States. After
the Second World War, he returned to France and was commissioned
to do the ceiling of the (old) Opera House.
He also created outstanding stained glass art for Jerusalem's Hadassah
Hospital and the United Nations building in New York City. The latter
used to be in a prominent place but under the secretaryship of Kurt
Waldheim, it was removed and placed in a relatively obscure area.
When Chagall came to Paris as a young man, the advent of photography
and other factors were undermining traditional representational
art. Change was rapid. In a familiar pattern, the heresy of the
previous day became the entrenched position of the next one. To
this scene, he brought a liberating spirit of his uncanny ability
to tap into his unconscious. He invited his fellow artists to explore
the infinity of their own unconscious, where they would never lack
for subjects or for novelty.
Chagall died in France just short of his 98th birthday. With all
his many achievements, he is best remembered as the painter-poet
of the centuries-old Eastern European Jewish civilization, distinguished
for most of its existence by persecution, impoverishment, victimization,
violence and, in the end, extermination, but which during its lifetime
was a centre of Jewish religiosity and learning.
Chagall's response to a world so full of tragedy and dangers was
similar to that of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Chassidism.
Looking around him in 18th-century Poland and seeing that life for
Jews was bad and likely to get worse, the Baal Shem Tov sang and
danced to a frenzy in praise of God. Possibly escapist, certainly
bizarre, hopelessly and completely irrational, Chassidism had, nevertheless,
a charm and illogic that goes beyond cold veracity and penetrates
deeper than bare reason. Chagall's art similarly resonates with
chords deep in our unconscious. For its full appreciation, it demands
a "letting go" and an "immersion into" the Mystery
that we hope, contrary to evidence and experience, is ultimately
benign.
Eugene Kaellis is a retired acadmic living in New Westminster.
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