Chagall's Prayer Desk

STUDIA ROSENTHALIANAA PAROKHET 37 (2004) AS A PICTURE: CHAGALL'S TABLE DES PRIERES (1908-1909) 193

A Parokhet as a Picture: Chagall’s Prayer Desk (1908-1909)1

MIRJAM RAJNER

LITTLE-KNOWN PAINTING BY Marc Chagall usually referred to as the A Prayer Desk and dated 1909 shows a Torah Ark curtain or parokhet hung above a low narrow table (fig. 1). Franz Meyer suggested that this work was painted in a private home in Narva, a small town on the Bal- tic coast where Chagall used to visit a wealthy Jewish family of industri- alists, the Germonts. They were his patron, the lawyer Grigory A. Goldberg’s in-laws, and as an art student studying in St Petersburg, Chagall often spent his vacations at their home.2 Meyer describes the painting as ‘the paraphernalia used in the [Germont] family devotions’.3 This would have been an unusual practice for a Jewish family. For a service to include a reading from the Torah, a quorum of ten men (a minyan) must be present. This makes it a communal ceremony, in con- trast to the private devotions practised among aristocratic Christian families with chapels attached to their homes. Moreover, the parokhet in Chagall’s painting hangs flat against the wall rather than covering an Ark containing a Torah scroll, which is its function, and which would require much greater depth. Chagall depicted similar synagogue furnishings in his 1917 work The Synagogue (fig. 2) in which the Ark is covered by a parokhet deco-

1. This article is a variation on my PhD thesis ‘Marc Chagall (1906-1910)’ (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2004), supervised by Prof. Ziva Amishai-Maisels to whom I would like to express my thanks. 2. F. Meyer, Chagall, Life and Work (New York 1963), p. 69. Meyer translates the French title of the work, Le Table des Prières, as ‘Praying Desk’. 3. Ibid. 194 MIRJAM RAJNER

Figure 1. Marc Chagall, The Prayer Desk, oil on canvas, 45.9 x 58.6 cm, 1908-1909 (private collection). © ADAGP, Paris, 2005 A PAROKHET AS A PICTURE: CHAGALL'S TABLE DES PRIERES (1908-1909) 195 rated with a similar, single Star of David, beside which stands a low table. However, while above the table in the 1917 depiction of the synagogue a ‘Menorah’ plaque is shown, in the earlier work a parokhet is fea- tured. The curtain seems to be mounted on a frame, possibly an easel, as suggested by the support board typical of an easel-like structure, project- ing above it. The curtain thus appears in Chagall’s early painting re- moved from its original use and exhibited as an art object. Beside the parokhet Chagall placed a tall, slender table. This may once have had a different function. Similar objects were used as shtender (lecterns) in small Eastern European synagogues for holy books, for prayer and study (fig. 3). Occasionally, they were also used for writing,

Figure 2. Marc Chagall, The Synagogue, gouache, watercolour, pencil on paper, 40 x 35 cm, 1917 (Marcus Diener, Basel). © ADAGP, Paris, 2005 196 MIRJAM RAJNER

Figure 3. Shtender, Jablonov, 18th century (exh. cat. Treasures of Jewish Galicia, Beth Hatefutsot, Tel Aviv 1996, p. 118) A PAROKHET AS A PICTURE: CHAGALL'S TABLE DES PRIERES (1908-1909) 197 as in the case of the famous Yiddish writer, Sholom Aleikhem, who often wrote while standing.4 In Chagall’s painting it supports two objects, possibly a glass bottle to the left and a silver Torah shield beside it. The bottle is placed under a bud-like wall pattern, which thus serves as an elegant cover turning the bottle into a carafe. Such bottles for the kiddush wine were used on Shabbat and festivals (fig. 4). The Torah shield leans against the wall, its chain seems to be hanging in front, forming a Y, and its lower left edge appears to be damaged. In front of the carafe and the shield, Chagall set a prayer book, while the black straps and two black boxes on the table beneath the parokhet seem to be phylacteries. Taken out of the context of the synagogue and Jewish home and set beside the wall of a room with a door to their left, they, along with the mounted parokhet, suggest a display ready to be presented, documented and studied as in a museum. Upon his return from Vitebsk to St Petersburg, in the autumn of 1908, Chagall lived at Zakharyevskaya Street, no. 25, which contained Maxim Vinaver’s home and office.5 It was at this time that Vinaver, the famous St Petersburg lawyer, one of the leaders of the Russian Liberal party and the Jewish National Group, took over from his assistant, Goldberg, as Chagall’s patron. Chagall and Vinaver started to meet regularly and developed a close relationship. In his autobiography, the artist recalled him with warmth and appreciation.6 The apartment on Zakharyevskaya Street in which Chagall lived was, according to his memoirs, ‘occupied by the editorial board of the magazine Dawn’.7 ‘Dawn’ is a translation of the name of the Russian-

4. See a photograph of the writer at his writing stand in A. Lis (ed.), Shalom-Aleichem, his Life in Pictures (Tel Aviv 1988), p. 70. 5. Chagall’s letter to Baron David Gintsburg in December 1908 bears this address (M. Cha- gall and Kh. Firin, ‘Menya mozhet ponyat stradalets khudozhnik’ [Peterburgskie gody M.Z. Shagala], Iskusstvo Leningrada, no. 8, 1990, letter no. 1, p. 105). 6. M. Chagall, My Life (New York 1994), p. 95-96. See also similar recollections on their relationship written in Paris after Vinaver’s death (Marc Chagall, ‘Pamyati M. M. Vinavera’, in Razsviet, Paris, no. 43, 24 October 1926, p. 11). 7. Chagall, op. cit., p. 97. 198 MIRJAM RAJNER

Figure 4. Wine decanter, glass, 24.75 cm, Bohemia, late nineteenth century (private collection) A PAROKHET AS A PICTURE: CHAGALL'S TABLE DES PRIERES (1908-1909) 199

Jewish magazine Voskhod, the mouthpiece of the Russian-Jewish intelli- gentsia, published between 1882 and 1906. Vinaver was a member of its editorial board before its closure in July 1906, and again in January 1910 when it reappeared as Novyi Voskhod.8 During 1908-09, therefore, when Chagall lived there, and while the magazine was not being published, the apartment may have been full of old pre-1906 copies. Moreover, since they were planning to relaunch the periodical, members of the original and future editorial boards probably met there regularly. This gave Chagall an opportunity to meet all of St Petersburg’s Jewish intellectuals who were involved in the magazine and active in both the strug- gle for the legal emancipation of Russian Jewry, and the modernisation and secularisation of the Jewish community.9 The connection with Vinaver therefore placed Chagall at the very centre of the Jewish politi- cal, social and cultural revival.10 In his autobiography, Chagall described the atmosphere in the office he used as his studio: The editorial room was full of my canvases and sketches. It didn’t look like an editorial room now, more like a studio. My thoughts on

8. Evreiskaya entsiklopediya: svod znanyi o evreistve i ego kulture v proshlom i nastoyashchem (St Petersburg 1906-1913) 5, col. 813, 11, col. 766. 9. In addition to his first patron, the lawyer Goldberg, the literary and philosophical historian Leopold Sev, the art critic Maximilian Syrkin and the writer Solomon Pozner whom Chagall had already met during his 1907-08 stay in St Petersburg (Meyer, op. cit., p. 50, 57; Rossiskaya evreiskaya entsiklopediya [Moscow 1994] 1, p. 340-341; Evreiskaya entsiklopediya 14, col. 102; cols. 657-668; 12, cols. 665-666), he may now have met Henrikh Sliozberg, Moisei Trivus, Mikhail Sheftel and Lev Shternberg (Evreiskaya entsiklopediya 14, cols. 372-373; 15, col. 20; 16, col. 19; cols. 107-108); Like Vinaver, probably all served as a role model for Chagall. They, like his own father, were all about 20 to 30 years older than Chagall, and had been brought up in provincial towns or villages, as he had. However, unlike his father, they all broke away from traditional Jewish life and left the shtetl. They had gained a secular university education, either in the capital or abroad, had succeeded as professionals in Russian society, had adopted enlightened, acculturated and liberal positions, opposed Tsarism, and then turned to the ‘suffering Jewish masses’ in order to fight for their rights and improve their lives. To Chagall, they probably combined the best of both worlds: worldly knowledge and liberalism on one side, and Jewish secular, national identity on the other. 10. On Chagall’s connection with Vinaver and the other editors of the Voskhod and Novyi Voskhod, see also Z. Amishai-Maisels, ‘Chagall and the Jewish Revival: Center or Periphery?’, in: R. Apter-Gabriel (ed.), Tradition and Revolution: The Jewish Renaissance in Russian Avant-Garde Art, 1912-1928, exh. cat. (The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, June 1987), p. 73, n. 18-19. On the Jewish revival, see C. Gassenschmidt, Jewish Liberal Politics in Tsarist Russia, 1900-1914: The Modernization of Russian Jewry (New York 1995), p. 72-109. 200 MIRJAM RAJNER

art mingled with the voices of the editors who came to discuss and work. In the intervals and at the end of the meeting, they would walk through my ‘studio’ and I would hide behind the piled-up copies of ‘Dawn’ that lined half of the room.11 As a result of these contacts, Chagall must have also been well ac- quainted with the activities of various new Jewish societies founded in the autumn of 1908. In October of that year both the Jewish Literary Society (JLS) and the Jewish Historiographic Society (JHS) began organising activities in St Petersburg. While JLS encouraged interest in Jewish literature and helped young writers, JHS’s main aim was to collect and edit archival material relating to Jewish history, organising lectures on historical subjects, setting up a museum, and editing a historical journal. Many of St Petersburg’s Jewish intellectuals became members of this society, including Vinaver and the well-known Jewish historian Simon Dubnov. It was this society that launched the journal Evreiskii Mir, and together with the Jewish Historical and Ethnographic Society, published scientific periodicals such as Perezhitoe from late 1908, and Evreiskaya Starina edited by Dubnov, from January 1909.12 Finally, in November 1908, the Jewish Historical and Ethnographic Society (JHES) was formed. Vinaver was the chairman of JHES, while the committee also included Dubnov and Goldberg.13 The committee met in Vinaver’s home, offering Chagall firsthand contact with their activities.14 Their aim was to collect historical and ethnographic material concern- ing the Jews of Russia and Poland, to systematically publish their documents and records as well as a journal and separate scientific studies, and to organise lectures. During their first year they held free public lectures, and laid the foundations for a historical and ethnographic archive. In addition to Dubnov and Vinaver, one of JHES’s most active members was the writer and ethnographer Shlomo-Zanvil Rappaport, known as Shlomo An-Sky.

11. Chagall, op. cit., p. 98. 12. Gassenschmidt 74, n. 10-11. 13. Evreiskaya entsiklopediya 7, cols. 449-450. 14. The opening page of Evreiskaya Starina 2 (April-June 1909) gave the JHES committee’s address as Zakharyevskaya Street 25. A PAROKHET AS A PICTURE: CHAGALL'S TABLE DES PRIERES (1908-1909) 201

Although neither Chagall nor Meyer mention his name during this early Russian period, Chagall must have met An-Sky while studying in St Petersburg, and probably had already heard of him in Vitebsk, where An-Sky was born and grew up in an Orthodox family. At the age of six- teen, he learned Russian and became a follower of the local Haskalah (Enlightenment) movement, living for a short time in 1881 in Lyozno. He supported himself there by teaching, trying to bring new ideas to this small, mainly Hasidic community. When he was caught spreading forbidden literature among the local yeshiva students, he was accused of being a free-thinker. Threatened by the rabbi with excommunication, An-Sky had to leave. Such a scandal would have been remembered by Chagall’s pious relatives who lived in Lyozno and whom Chagall regularly visited, and may have reached the young artist’s ears either as a warning or as gossip. These events caused An-Sky to forsake the Jewish community and to turn to populism and socialist ideology. He spent many years living among Russian peasants, workers and radicals, becoming a revolutionary activist, first in Russia and later abroad, among Russian émigrés in France and Switzerland. It was his encounter with anti-Semitism during the Dreyfus trial in 1894, the pogrom in Kishinev in 1903, and the wave of pogroms throughout the Pale of Settlement in 1905 that made An- Sky gradually abandon the Socialist Revolutionary cause and switch his energies back to helping his own people.15 While living among the Russian peasants, An-Sky had started to study Russian folklore as an educational tool. He collected folk stories, legends and songs in which he saw elements of the socialist spirit. He wrote articles for Russian magazines and contributed to the already wide- spread interest in Russian folklore.16 It had been studied since the early

15. On An-Sky, see Evreiskaya entsiklopediya 2, cols. 617-618; D.G. Roskies, ‘The Maskil as a Folk Hero’, in Prooftexts 10, no. 2, 1990, p. 233, n. 1 (for a list of major biographical sources); and R. Gonen (ed.), Back to the Shtetl: An-Sky and the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition, 1912-1914 (The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Spring-Summer 1994) [Hebrew]. 16. D. Noy, ‘An-Sky the Meshulah: Between the Verbal and the Visual in Jewish Folk Cul- ture’, in: Gonen (ed.), op. cit., p. 77, n. 5; B. Lukin, ‘From Folklore to Folk: An-Sky and Jewish Ethnography’, ibid., p. 27, n. 7-9. 202 MIRJAM RAJNER

1870s, and by the late 1880s one of the main research methods was ethnographic expeditions. For instance, in 1889, the Moscow Society of Lovers of Natural Science, Anthropology and Ethnography organised an expedition to Vologda province, in which the young Vassily Kandinsky participated.17 These activities were probably closely followed by An-Sky. Upon his arrival in Paris in 1892, he pursued these interests, studying French folklore while participating in the French socialist movement. It is not surprising, therefore, that when An-Sky tried to reconnect to his Jewish roots he did so through research into Jewish folklore. It was at the end of 1908, at the time that Chagall was living and painting in Vinaver’s office, that An-Sky published his first article entitled ‘Jewish Folk Creation’ in the first volume of the newly founded journal Perezhitoe. The magazine focused on the social and cultural history of the Jews in Russia. It ran until 1912, parallelling Evreiskaya Starina, the JHES journal. In the introduction to the first issue Perezhitoe’s editorial board, on which An-Sky sat, published an invitation to readers to con- tribute material such as pinkasim (record books) of Jewish communities, manuscripts (‘in old Hebrew, spoken Hebrew, Russian, Polish etc’), old printed editions, family chronicles, records of folk traditions, local customs and prayers, folk songs with a historical content, tombstone texts and inscriptions, letters, diaries, descriptions of Jewish writers, community activists, rabbis, Hasidic tsaddikim, etc. The importance of this material was that ‘each line and sign has its meaning in reconstructing the past’. An-Sky’s article stresses the importance of the genius of the Jewish people and offers examples of Jewish poetic and narrative creativity.18 In the introduction, An-Sky underlines the importance of folk creations by stressing that ‘a Jew should know [Yiddish] sayings and jokes, just as he should possess a deep knowledge of Judaism’.19 As a socialist who had rejected his Orthodox upbringing, An-Sky referred to Jewish religious

17. Kandinsky – Russische Zeit und Bauhausjahre 1915-1933, exh. cat. (Bauhaus Archiv, Mu- seum für Gestaltung, Berlin, 9 August-23 September 1984), p. 400. 18. The article was republished in the complete works: Sh. An-Sky, ‘Di Yiddische Folks- Schafung’, in Gezamelte Schriften 15 (2nd ed., Vilna, Warsaw and New York 1928), p. 29-95. 19. An-Sky, op. cit., p. 30. A PAROKHET AS A PICTURE: CHAGALL'S TABLE DES PRIERES (1908-1909) 203 tradition as a folk tradition that parallelled the wanderings of the Jews in the Diaspora. The study and knowledge of this Jewish folk creation – according to An-Sky – and not of the holy texts, would offer a modern Jew a feeling of belonging, of roots and of nationality, similar to the way Russian or French folklore gave these peoples their ‘national spirit’. Apart from following his publications and meeting him personally, Chagall may also have attended An-Sky’s public lectures in St Peters- burg. In December 1908, at the first JHES congress, An-Sky tried to convince the audience of the importance and urgency of ethnographic research, as he felt there was a real threat of losing the ‘thousand-year- old’ folk tradition. He complained about the lack of funds for this mis- sion and suggested equipping an expedition to ‘collect folk-songs and historic and ethnographic material.’20 JHES organised ethnographic expeditions to collect samples of Jew- ish material folk culture led by An-Sky between 1912 and 1914. Yet the importance of this visual rather than written and oral heritage was already emphasised at the beginning of Russian Jewish ethnographic research.21 Early in 1909, for example, a lengthy article on Jewish art in Poland by the historian Meir Balaban appeared in the first issue of Evreiskaya Starina. Having defined Jewish art as objects created by Jews with ‘all the characteristics of original Jewish creativity’, Balaban listed the following categories: synagogal art and architecture, tombstone carvings, candlesticks and lamps, and illuminated manuscripts. Apart from giving a detailed inventory of Jewish art in Poland, Balaban also offered a brief description of various private collections of Jewish cer-

20. Lukin, op. cit., p. 29, n. 15. 21. From the surviving publications that appeared between 1908 and 1910, this early stage of Russian Jewish ethnographic research seems to have been mainly focused on collecting and preserv- ing Jewish verbal folk-creations such as sayings, idioms, songs, Hasidic legends, descriptions of customs etc (see additional articles by An-Sky such as ‘Evreiskaya narodnaya pesnya’, in Evreiskaya Starina 2 (April-June 1909), p. 56-70; ‘Narodnya detskiya pesni’, in Evreiskaya Starina 3 (July-Sep- tember 1910), p. 391-403; ‘Zagovory od durnogo glaza, boleznei i neschastnykh sluchaev [Ob- sprecheniss, Vereidung] sredi evreev severo-zapadnago kraya’, in Evreiskaya Starina 1 (January- March 1909), p. 72-80; and other publications such as I. Bernstein, Jüdische Sprichwörter und Redensarten [Warsaw 1908]; or P. Wengeroff, Memoiren einer Grossmutter, Bilder aus der Kulturgeschichte der Juden Russlands in 19. Jahrhundert [Berlin 1908-1910], 2 vols.). See also Noy, op. cit., p. 77-83. 204 MIRJAM RAJNER emonial art in Europe and of exhibitions where objects were shown.22 Balaban’s article may have reminded Chagall of similar pieces published in the German-Jewish Zionist journal Ost und West, in Berlin from 1901, which he must have known already in Vitebsk while studying with Yehuda Pen, his first art teacher.23 Elena Kabishcher-Yakirson, one of Pen’s later students, recalled her teacher’s use of this journal as a ‘sort of manual’.24 Ost und West, which had been known in Vitebsk at least since 1904,25 encouraged the revival of Jewish art and published several articles on the subject. Apart from the many contemporary Jewish artists repre- sented on its pages, Ost und West published surveys of traditional Jewish art, such as synagogal and ceremonial art, manuscript illumination and tombstone carvings.26 These objects were researched in a scholarly way and were presented as examples of Jewish folk art, and as a basis for the creation of a national art. When he returned to St Petersburg in the autumn of 1908 and set- tled in Vinaver’s house, Chagall was therefore continuously exposed to research on East European Jewish folk culture. The Prayer Desk (fig. 1) seems to be the first result of this encounter with research into Jewish folk heritage and the beginnings of the Jewish ethnographic collection in St Petersburg. Since Evreiskaia Starina reports in January-March 1909 on the historical materials, documents and objects stored at JHES’s premises,27 the collection must have started to accumulate in 1908, mo- tivated by An-Sky’s fear of the imminent disappearance of Jewish folk culture. Jewish ceremonial objects may also have been stored in the St Petersburg offices or apartments of Jewish activists, forming the begin-

22. M. Balaban, ‘Evreiskie istoricheskie pamyatniki v Polshe (vvdedenie v istoriyu everiskogo iskusstva v Polshe)’, in Evreiskaia Starina 1 (January-March 1909), p. 55-71. 23. See e.g., B. Segal, ‘Synagogale Kunst’, in Ost und West 1, no. 4 (1901), cols. 275-290; and B. Samuel, ‘Synagogale Kunst’, in idem 3, no. 6 (1903), cols. 415-422. 24. Amishai-Maisels, op. cit., p. 72- 73; G. Kazovsky, Artists from Vitebsk: Yehuda Pen and his Pupils (Moscow 1992), p. 28. 25. As pointed out by Amishai-Maisels (op. cit., n. 11), the distribution list in Ost und West, 4 July 1904, p. I, includes, apart from St Petersburg, a number of cities and towns in the Pale of Settlement, including Vitebsk. 26. Idem, p. 73, n. 13. 27. Evreiskai Starina 1, no. 2 (January-March 1909), p. 156-157. A PAROKHET AS A PICTURE: CHAGALL'S TABLE DES PRIERES (1908-1909) 205 nings of the future Jewish museum’s collection (fig. 5). Indeed, a simi- larly damaged Torah shield to the one portrayed by Chagall appears in An-Sky’s collection (fig. 6). It is also possible that Chagall painted his

Figure 5. Jewish Ethnographic Museum, Leningrad, c. 1925 (from R. Gonen [ed.], Back to the Shtetl: An-Sky and the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition, 1912-1914, exh. cat. The Israel Museum, Jerusalem [Spring-Summer 1994], p. 48)

Figure 6. Torah shield, silver coated copper, 14 x 12 cm, eighteenth century (An-Sky collection, State Ethnographic Museum, St Petersburg) 206 MIRJAM RAJNER work towards the end of 1908 for the JHES committee. Judging from a letter written to Baron David Ginzburg in December 1908, Chagall was in serious financial trouble28 and by commissioning this painting the committee may have been trying to help him.

Figure 7. Yehuda Pen, Divorce (detail), 1907 (The Art Museum, Vitebsk, Belarus)

28. Chagall and Firin, ‘Menya mozhet ponyat stradalets khudozhnik’, letter no. 1, p. 105. A PAROKHET AS A PICTURE: CHAGALL'S TABLE DES PRIERES (1908-1909) 207

Chagall was probably familiar with depictions of Jewish ceremonial objects in the paintings of Jewish artists such as Moritz Oppenheim, Isidor Kaufmann, Lepold Pilichovski, Samuel Hirszenberg, Lazar Krestin and others. Apart from reproductions on the pages of Ost und West magazine, he may have seen their work on the popular Jewish postcards of the early twentieth century.29 Numerous ritual objects were depicted in these scenes from Jewish life, holidays and synagogue: Shabbat candlesticks, Shabbat and Chanukah lamps, etrog cases, parokhets, Torah mantles, Torah crowns and much besides. When showing interiors of Jewish homes, they often included portraits of famous Jewish rabbis – who themselves were shown with holy books bound in precious bind- ings or wearing phylacteries, as in the case of the Vilna Gaon depicted in Pen’s Divorce of 1907 (fig. 7). Finally, upon arriving in St Petersburg in the winter of 1906-1907, Chagall first worked with the Jewish pho- tographer and academic artist Mordecai Joffe,30 whose The Parents’ Bless- ings for a Good Year on the Eve of the Day of Atonement, 1907 (?) is today known only from the postcard (fig. 8).31 Joffe’s topic recalls Moritz

Figure 8. Mordecai Joffe, The Parents’ Blessings for a Good Year on the Eve of the Day of Atonement, postcard, 1907 (?) (from V. Dymshits and V. Kelner, Evreiskii mir v pochtovykh otkrytkakh [Moscow 2002], p. 12)

29. See V. Dymshits and V. Kelner, Evreiskii mir v pochtovykh otkrytkakh (Jewish World in Postcards) (Moscow 2002). 30. Meyer, op. cit., p. 50. 31. Dymshits and Kelner, op. cit., p. 12. 208 MIRJAM RAJNER

Oppenheim’s album Scenes from Traditional Jewish Family Life (1860- 1880),32 while his special interest in this German Jewish artist’s work is shown by Joffe’s article ‘Oppenheim – National Jewish Artist’ published in the first volume of the miscellany Budushchnost, before 1913.33 Like Oppenheim, Joffe showed the interior of a traditional Jewish home, which included objects such as candlesticks with lit candles on the table and a Chanukah lamp hanging on the left wall, and like Pen he included portraits of famous Jewish personalities and rabbis. In addition to participating in the revival of Jewish art in Russia, Joffe was also interested in its development in the Holy Land. He was one of the founders of Bezalel, the Jewish art society launched in St Petersburg in early 1908. Its main aim was to research and develop Jew- ish creativity in the fine arts (sculpture, painting and architecture), as well as to support Jewish art schools and artistic industry in Palestine. Bezalel planned to spread its activities throughout Russia by publishing material about the history of Jewish art, promoting the subject through public lectures, founding museums and organising exhibitions, and by supporting individual Jewish artists as well as Jewish arts and crafts schools.34 Thus, although Chagall was no longer working for Joffe by the autumn of 1908, their contact widened his acquaintance with modern Jew- ish art, both fine and applied. He may also have been familiar with the frontispiece created in 1905 by the Russian architect Ivan Ropet for a portfolio of sheets copied from illuminated Hebrew mediaeval manuscripts at the Imperial Public Library in St Petersburg, entitled L’Ornement Hébreu (fig. 9). As I have shown elsewhere, the design of the

32. See his ‘Ushering in the Sabbath’ and ‘Sabbath Eve’, in: Moritz Oppenheim, the First Jew- ish Painter, exh. cat. (The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Autumn 1983), ills. III. 14 and IV. 12. 33. The article appears in the bibliography accompanying the entry on Oppenheim in the Evreiskaya entsiklopediya 12, col. 113. 34. The official application to found the Bezalel Society, addressed to St Petersburg’s mayor, arrived at his office in February 1908 (copies preserved in a private archive, Jerusalem). In the re- quest Joffe asks for permission to found the society and offers a description of its objectives as out- lined in the proposed statute. The statute was partially published in Razsviet, St Petersburg, no. 24 (22 June 1908), cols. 31-32. Although it seems that the society’s ambitious plan was not entirely ful- filled, St Petersburg’s Bezalel was still listed as an active Jewish art society in 1912 (Evreiskaya entsiklopediya 13, col. 949). A PAROKHET AS A PICTURE: CHAGALL'S TABLE DES PRIERES (1908-1909) 209

Figure 9. L’Ornement Hébreu (St Petersburg 1886-Berlin 1905), frontispiece designed by Ivan Ropet (Courtesy of Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem) 210 MIRJAM RAJNER frontispiece was an imaginative and eclectic mixture combining Jewish symbols with patterns found in St Petersburg’s Hebrew manuscripts, stylised and original Hebrew script, and characteristic Russian folk art motifs.35 The megillah, recalling the megilloth Esther, which appears at the lower centre, was intended as a tribute to Baron Horace Ginzburg, who financed the project. Moreover, the Hebrew verse at the top of the frame – ‘And see that you make them after their pattern, which was shown to you in the mountain’ (Ex. 25:40) – recalls Jewish art’s biblical roots in the building of the Tabernacle. Apart from the frontispiece, as Baron David Ginzburg mentioned in his introduction to the portfolio, the ornamentation in the manuscripts also inspired other examples of Jewish art, such as a now lost (?) High Holidays parokhet at St Peters- burg’s Choral Synagogue.36 However, although Chagall’s depiction of Jewish ceremonial objects (fig. 1) can be grouped with Jewish art created by predecessors such as Oppenheim, Joffe and Ropet, its approach is different. Most paintings depicting scenes from Jewish life included ceremonial objects in order to stress the Jewishness of the subject portrayed. Ropet’s frontispiece offered a contemporary example of Jewish graphic art based on traditional designs. Chagall’s painting, however, showed Jewish ceremonial art in a new light. Although the Prayer Desk may be simply understood as a documentation of assembled objects of Jewish folk culture, here the exhibited items – freed from their function, and from their usual, second- ary role of lending Jewish identity to a painting – are the painting’s cen- tral and only subject: they are the picture. Chagall may have seen this approach at the apartment of the famous Russian Jewish artist Leon Bakst, where a parokhet hung on the wall in an anteroom as an exhibit among other art works: ‘On the walls paintings of Greek gods, a black velvet Ark curtain [parokhet], from a

35. M. Rajner, ‘The Awakening of Jewish National Art in Russia’, in Jewish Art 16/17 (1990- 1991), p. 109. See also Illuminations from Hebrew Bibles of Leningrad, originally published by Baron David Günzburg and Vladimir Stassoff, facsimile of the 27 original large colour plates accompanied by a new introduction with 25 additional plates and new descriptions by Bezalel Narkiss (Jerusalem 1990). 36. Rajner, op. cit., p. 109. A PAROKHET AS A PICTURE: CHAGALL'S TABLE DES PRIERES (1908-1909) 211 synagogue, embroidered in silver’.37 Since Chagall started to study with Leon Bakst, early in 1909, this visit would have occurred at the time he was applying to his school, towards the end of 1908 or the beginning of 1909 – about the time Chagall created the Prayer Desk. The parokhet in Bakst’s apartment hanging next to non-Jewish paintings, may have suggested to Chagall that he could turn the JHES parokhet into an art object by mounting it on an easel and using it as the subject for his own painting. Chagall must also have been familiar with a similar trend among the young Russian artists who were starting to study, collect and eventu- ally exhibit icons as art creations, out of their religious and ceremonial context. In 1901, as a result of the activities of the Committee for the Guardianship of Russian Icon Painting, supported by Tsar Nicholas II, a number of art schools and individual artists embarked on a programme to revive Russian icon painting.38 Icons were now seen not only as an authentic symbol of Russia’s past but also as a contemporary symbol of Russian Orthodoxy and the entire nation. Although the revival stressed the study of the old schools of icon painting, the new workshops worked closely with contemporary artists. Among them, Nikolai Roerich, head of the School supported by the ‘Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts', in which Chagall studied between 1907 and 1908, played an important role. Roerich was among several Russian artists involved in restoring, collecting and studying thirteenth-sixteenth century icons that had been over-painted by later layers or whose colours were concealed by darkened varnish.39 The 1904 cleaning of Andrei Rublev’s Old Testament Trinity, revealing its original colours and its un- expected beauty drew the attention of the young artists. This process

37. Corrected from Chagall, op. cit., p. 87. The original translation, ‘altar-curtain’, is errone- ous since synagogues do not have altars. In the Yiddish version of his autobiography Chagall describes it as a ‘parokhet fun a shuhl-Aron-Kodesh’ (‘Ark-curtain from a synagogue Holy Ark') (M. Chagall, ‘Eygens, Oytobiografie’, in Di Tsukunft, New York 30 [March-July 1925], p. 293). 38. See O. Tarasov, ‘The Russian Icon and the Culture of the Modern: The Renaissance of Popular Icon Painting in the Reign of Nicholas II’, in Experiment: A Journal of Russian Culture, Institute of Modern Russian Culture 7 (Los Angeles 2001), p. 73-102. 39. See J. Decter, Nicholas Roerich: The Life and Art of a Russian Master (London 1989), p. 58-60; Zolotoe runo, no. 4 (1907), p. 18, 20-26; and A.D. Alekhin, ‘Tvorcheskii metod N.K. Re- rikha’, in: M. Kuzmina (ed.), N.K. Rerikh, zhizn i tvorchestvo (Moscow 1978), p. 48, 266-268. 212 MIRJAM RAJNER continued through 1906-10 and early Russian icon painting strongly influenced Russian avant-garde art.40 Chagall may have seen a connection between iconostases – screens of icons separating the sanctuary from the nave in Russian Orthodox churches (fig. 10) – and parokhet, which originally separated the Holy of Holies from the rest of the Sanctuary in the wilderness (Ex. 26:31). However, while icons provided young Russian artists with a rich pictorial heritage, brilliant colours and original forms unlike those of classical academic art; for Chagall the pictorial and visual heritage of parokhot was more limited. Thus to be able to present the parokhet as an example of Jewish folk creation, Chagall emphasised its primitive character, applying a new child-like style to the entire painting: the perspective is in- correct and awkward, while the lines surrounding the table, the stand and the door, and the line dividing the floor from the wall are neither precise nor straight, recalling a child’s lack of interest and inability to draw correctly.41

Figure 10. Iconostatis, eighteenth century (Church of St George, David-Gorodok, Belarus)

40. A. Parton, Mikhail Larionov and the Russian Avant-Garde (Princeton 1993), p. 87-90. 41. Children’s drawings are considered spontaneous and non-geometric because the child does not yet completely control the movements of the arm, hand and fingers, and because children have no innate need for precision (see A. Almgren, Die Umgekehrte Perspektive und die Flucht- achsenperspektive: Eine Untersuchung der Zeichen für Raum und Körper in Kinderzeichnungen und anderen Bildern [Uppsala 1971], p. 14, 66). A PAROKHET AS A PICTURE: CHAGALL'S TABLE DES PRIERES (1908-1909) 213

Chagall developed this style in the summer of 1908 at Vitebsk, based on an intense interest in children’s art as a source of primitivism, which he had encountered during the spring of that year in St Petersburg. During his studies there, Chagall probably became familiar with the ideas of Viacheslav Ivanov, the philosopher and writer belonging to the second generation of Russian Symbolists. Ivanov believed in the need to reconcile high and low art and in April 1908 published an article entitled ‘Two Elements in Contemporary Symbolism’, in the richly produced Russian art magazine ‘Golden Fleece'. In it, he suggested that artists should use everyday objects as symbols, just as children and primitives do in their art. These everyday symbolic objects would ‘enable us to become aware of the interrelationship and the meaning of what exists not only in the sphere of earthly, empirical con- sciousness, but in other spheres as well’.42 In April 1908, Leon Bakst also referred to the importance of primitive and children’s art. He gave a lecture entitled ‘The Painting of the Future and Its Relation to the Art of Antiquity’ at the Theatre Club in St Petersburg.43 In May 1907, Bakst had travelled together with the Russian artist Valentin Serov to Greece where they had come under the spell of Archaic art, inspiring them to re-examine the tradition of classical art. These new ideas led Bakst to envision the art of the future as based on children’s painting. Bakst ad- mired children’s painting because of its honesty, emotion and colour. It was similar to folk and Archaic art. He also compared it to the works of Gauguin, Matisse and Denis.44 Like Ivanov, he praised the symbolic quality of this art: everyday objects were raised to a symbolic level or to abstraction, as in children’s and primitive art. He also suggested formal means to achieve this: artists should become impudent, simple, rude and primitive. Painting would then develop ‘a terse style, because the

42. V.I. Ivanov, ‘Dve stikhii v sovremennom simvolizme’, in Zolotoe runo, nos. 3-4 (1908), p. 86-94. 43. I. Pruzhan, Leon Bakst (Harmondswarth 1988), p. 220. The lecture was published in No- vember 1909 in L. Bakst, ‘Puti klassitsizma v iskusstv’, in Apollon, no. 2 (November-December 1909), p. 63-78; no. 3, p. 46-62. 44. Bakst, op. cit., no. 3, p. 54-61. 214 MIRJAM RAJNER new art cannot endure refinement […] Future painting will crawl down into the depths of coarseness’.45 In addition to this theoretical debate, the development of Chagall’s new child-like style was encouraged by examples of art created for children, children’s art and child-like art which had been in vogue in St Petersburg since 1908. For example in the spring of 1908, an article appeared in the weekly magazine ‘Theatre and Art' by the art critic Alexan- der Rostislavov entitled ‘The Art of Children and Adults’. It mentioned an exhibition of children’s art alongside works by artists belonging to the World of Art group, of which Bakst was also a member. While com- menting that exhibitions for adults are usually expected to carry serious and educational messages, the author found the children’s art direct and original. Rostislavov saw it as a kind of primitive art, lacking craftsman- ship, but stressing the ‘wonderful, mysterious, magical side of [artistic] creation […] Children’s art, with its complete lack of skill, excites us, [we] laugh at its naivety, [it] seems [that] we envy it.’46 Apart from the awkwardness and affected lack of skill in his Prayer Desk, Chagall’s decorative pattern on the wall seems also to be inspired by children’s art. It is possible that while studying in St Petersburg, Chagall may have had an opportunity to see Georg Kerschensteiner’s monumental collection of children’s drawings accompanying his study The Development of the Gift of Drawing, published in Munich in 1905. The book may have been available in the city thanks to various artists’ interest in this art and their links with Russian artists in Munich.47 Dr Kerschensteiner, a pedagogue and superintendent of schools in Munich,

45. Ibid., p. 60-61. Chagall probably heard Bakst’s lecture and recognised the modernity of his ideas. As already noted, by the time he painted the Prayer Desk he may have seen a parokhet on the wall of Bakst’s anteroom (see above). It may well have been Chagall’s recognition of the modernity of Bakst’s theory, which led the young artist to approach Bakst and to later study under him at Zvantseva School (Meyer, op. cit., p. 59). 46. A. Rostislavov, ‘Iskusstvo detei i vzroslykh’, in Teatr i iskusstvo, no. 9 (1908), p. 170-171. 47. G. Kerschensteiner, Die Entwicklung der Zeichnerischen Begabung (Munich 1905). The Russian artist Alexei Jawlensky, who lived at the time in Munich and was himself interested in children’s art, participated regularly in St Petersburg exhibitions and may have drawn their attention to Kerschensteiner’s work (see J. Fineberg, The Innocent Eye: Children’s Art and the Modern Artist [Princeton 1997], p. 49). A PAROKHET AS A PICTURE: CHAGALL'S TABLE DES PRIERES (1908-1909) 215 gathered almost half a million children’s drawings when preparing his comprehensive study, and his collection was well known and publicised in German-speaking countries.48 Among the drawings appearing in this book is a decorative pattern designed by a child for a book cover (fig. 11). Although Chagall’s decorative pattern on the wall does not ex- actly repeat the child’s design, his unequal and awkwardly painted shapes recall a child’s untrained eye and hand. Finally, Chagall’s use of a brownish hue for this painting seemed to also have primitive roots: it is earthy and recalls the colour of a potato, the basic food of simple folk. However, the diagonal view and cut composition of the Prayer Desk define the space and emphasise the work’s two-dimensionality, suggest-

Figure 11. Child’s drawing of a decorative pattern (from G. Kerschensteiner, Die Entwicklung der Zeichnerischen Begabung [Munich 1905], pl. 124, no. 2)

48. Fineberg, op. cit., p. 12. 216 MIRJAM RAJNER ing an additional, more sophisticated source. Chagall had already employed this perspective in the Goldberg’s Study (fig. 12), which was probably influenced by Mikhail Vrubel’s diagonal view in his Studio in Venice of 1886 (fig. 13). The same work may have inspired Chagall to adopt this angle in the Prayer Desk too. By 1908 Mikhail Vrubel was already a legend, especially among younger Russian artists. Well known to the public through his regular participation at the World of Art exhibitions from 1898 to 1906, he was considered by many to be one of the most important Russian artists of the turn of the century. His highly individual work, which introduced both literary and symbolic subjects into Russian art and employed an innovative style that challenged the traditional rendering of form, was often discussed in articles by fellow artists and scholars from 1903 on. By 1906 this interest intensified even further due to the mental illness, from which he had suffered since 1902: he became blind and stopped creat- ing.49 Chagall must have heard of Vrubel already in Vitebsk. His teacher Pen may have known Vrubel from their days at the Academy, he could have seen his work exhibited in St Petersburg and probably drew his students’ attention to the reproductions of this famous Symbolist artist’s works on the pages of the World of Art and the Golden Fleece magazines as well as in exhibition catalogues.50 Thus, according to Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, Vrubel inspired Eliezer Lissitzky’s early creations when he was studying with Pen,51 while Chagall claimed that he was the only one in Pen’s school to use violet, a colour typical of Vrubel’s work.52

49. On Vrubel, his art and life, see M.A. Vrubel, Perepiska. Vospominaniya o khudozhnike (Leningrad and Moscow 1963); J.E. Bowlt, The Silver Age: Russian Art of the Early Twentieth Cen- tury and the “World of Art” Group (Newtonville 1979), p. 133-149; D. Kogan, M.A. Vrubel (Moscow 1980); A. Isdebsky-Pritchard, The Art of Mikhail Vrubel (1856-1910) (Ann Arbor 1982); and M. Guerman, Mikhail Vrubel (Leningrad 1985). 50. Vrubel took part, along with other Moscow artists, in the World of Art exhibition held in St Petersburg in 1902. In 1903 the World of Art journal dedicated its no. 10-11 almost entirely to his work, which was richly reproduced and accompanied by several articles. In 1906 the first issue of ‘Golden Fleece' also reproduced a number of Vrubel’s works. Pen and his students were probably also aware of the exhibition of his work at the 1906 Russian art show at the Salon d’Automne in Paris and may have seen the accompanying catalogue. 51. S. Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts (London 1968), p. 16. 52. Chagall, op. cit., p. 59. A PAROKHET AS A PICTURE: CHAGALL'S TABLE DES PRIERES (1908-1909) 217

Figure 12. Marc Chagall, Goldberg’s Study, oil on canvas, 35.9 x 51.4 cm, c. 1907-1908 (private collection). © ADAGP, Paris, 2005

Figure 13. Mikhail Vrubel, Studio in Venice, album sheet, graphite on paper, 8 x 14.5 cm, 1886 (Museum of Russian Art, Kiev) 218 MIRJAM RAJNER

Vrubel was an important source of inspiration for a number of Chagall’s early works, and in his autobiography he even described an unusual dream, illustrating his wish to become a younger brother of Vrubel and his successor: Here is one of those dreams […] I remember seeing him [Vrubel], our well-beloved, take off his clothes […] He swims towards the open sea. But the wild sea roars, boils up […] What has become of my poor brother? We are all worried. All one can see, afar off, is his little head – no more gleaming legs. At last, even his head disappears. One arm is thrust out of the water, and then nothing more. All the children yelled: ‘He’s drowned; our eldest brother, Wrubel, is drowned […]’ The father repeated in his deep voice: ‘He’s drowned, our son, Wrubel. All we have left is a painter son, you, my son.’ That was me. I woke up.53 Thus, Vrubel’s drawing Still Life with a Candlestick, a Carafe, and a Glass of 1905 (fig. 14) may have given Chagall the idea of adding the glass bottle to the objects in his Prayer Desk.54 The play between the decorative pattern on the wall and that embroidered on the parokhet is also similar to the sense of confusion characteristic of Vrubel’s work. For instance, in his Fortune-Teller of 1895 (fig. 15), the similarity between the colours, treatment and pattern of the carpets on the floor and on the woman’s skirt and shawl diminishes the difference between them and creates a feeling of uncertainty which may have inspired Chagall to use similar scattered patterns on his wall and on the parokhet.55 As in the older painter’s work, these patterns and the confusion they cause are intended to further flatten the surface and dematerialise the objects. By combining the primitivism of a child-like style in this painting with Vrubel’s formal innovations, which emphasised two-dimensionality

53. Ibid., p. 84-85. 54. Chagall may have seen Vrubel’s drawing in a private collection in St Petersburg. Al- though it is only known to have been there after the city changed its name to Petrograd in 1914, it may have been acquired, along with his other 1905 drawings, by the time Chagall studied in Roerich’s school (Guerman, op. cit., cat. no. 192, p. 219, 249). 55. Chagall could have seen this painting reproduced in Mir iskusstva, no. 10-11 (1903). A PAROKHET AS A PICTURE: CHAGALL'S TABLE DES PRIERES (1908-1909) 219

Figure 14. Mikhail Vrubel, Still Life with a Candlestick, a Carafe, and a Glass, graphite on paper, 25 x 17.9 cm, 1905 (Russian Museum, St Petersburg) 220 MIRJAM RAJNER

Figure 15. Mikhail Vrubel, Fortune-Teller, oil on canvas, 135.5 x 86.5 cm, 1895 (Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow) A PAROKHET AS A PICTURE: CHAGALL'S TABLE DES PRIERES (1908-1909) 221 and dematerialisation, Chagall created a painting that combined low with high art, as Ivanov and Bakst had proposed. By depicting ceremonial objects used by Jews in everyday life in a child-like, primitive style Chagall created a new, folkic Jewish art. Yet by showing them in a flat- tened, diagonal space, blurring the distinction between object and back- ground, Chagall dematerialised these objects, making them more ab- stract and thus encouraging the viewer to concentrate on their inner, spiritual meaning that ties them to notions such as Jewish religious ex- perience, ancient tradition and timelessness. Just as Bakst had argued, therefore, Chagall had raised everyday objects to a symbolic level, in the way children and primitive artists do. This also made these objects self- sufficient and justified their representation as art creations free of their usual functional roles. Vinaver and the people around him were probably well pleased with this work, since it had a clear Jewish content. They encouraged Chagall to paint: Vinaver did everything he could to encourage me. With M. Syrkine and M. Sew, he dreamt of seeing me become a second Antokolsky. Every day, as he climbed the steps of his apartment, he would smile at me and ask: ‘Well, how are you getting on?'56 However, they might have been unprepared for Chagall’s modernism, as Chagall himself suggested in his autobiography: I dared not show him [Vinaver] my pictures for fear he would not like them. He often used to say he was a rank outsider in matters of art.57 Indeed, in his later works Chagall, when depicting Jewish ceremonial art, retreated to a more traditional representation, returning it to its original functional role. In the 1912-1914 works, for example, the parokhet is shown behind a traditional Jew in a synagogue, covering a

56. Chagall, op. cit., p. 98. In his article ‘Zametki ob iskusstve’ (Novyi put, no. 8, 1917, p. 36), Abram Efros explained that Jewish children who showed talent for drawing and painting were often nicknamed ‘a future Antokolsky’ (see J.E. Bowlt, ‘From the Pale of Settlement to the Reconstruc- tion of the World’, in: Apter-Gabriel [ed.], op. cit., p. 45, n. 19). 57. Chagall, op. cit., p. 99. 222 MIRJAM RAJNER

Torah Ark, while tefillin are placed on a Jew, wrapped in a prayershawl, praying.58 Still, with this early experiment Chagall may have inspired later fruitful dialogues between the wide array of Jewish ceremonial art, from tombstone carvings, synagogue paintings to manuscript illuminations – to mention just a few – and avant-garde Jewish artists, such as Nathan Altman, Eliezer Lissitzky, Issachar Ryback and others. Drawing on the wealth of objects collected by An-Sky in the Petrograd Jewish museum, they set out between 1916 and 1923 to create a new, mainly graphic Jewish art, avant-garde in form and Jewish in content.59

58. See Chagall’s Pinch of Snuff of 1912 and The Praying Jew of 1914, in: Meyer, op. cit., p. 195 and 234. 59. See R. Apter-Gabriel, ‘In the Spirit of An-Sky: Folk Motifs in Russian Jewish Art’, in: Gonen (ed.), op. cit., p. 111-118 [Hebrew].